"Geometry is concerned with the shapes of individual objects, and their spatial relationships to one another. Topology, the youngest and most sophisticated branch of geometry, focuses on the properties of geometric objects that remain unchanged upon continuous deformation—shrinking, stretching, and folding, but not tearing." [1]

They ran on parallel tracks for so long -- in denial, in retreat, in love. Now and then they approached one another, but asymptotically, curving away again before they touched. The arcs of their emotional lives intersected only once, on a warm May night when he said he loved her and then kissed her. He told her "You have no idea how long I wanted to do that" and she replied "Me, too". For five whole seconds, there was honesty between them, no barriers, and his hands and his mouth told her everything he'd been holding in for years. For five seconds of suspended time, her eyes and her voice told him the truth she'd been hiding even from herself. Then she pulled away from him and he disconnected entirely, reversing direction, so that where she once retreated she now chased his disappearing image on the horizon.

Now the lines of her life have all turned into curves, whorls, fractals turning in on themselves, circling back and back and back forever to the empty space where he used to be. The projection of her heart into the future is an extension into a void, an emptiness never to be filled by any other form. No equation but him can solve her.

The outline of his life changes even as he frantically grasps at it, tries to re-establish control, and loses. No matter how he tries, he cannot change the shape of the space between them, because he makes up only half of it. She twists him, bends him around her massive pull, until once again he takes on the conformation that complements her, completes them. He cannot fight gravity.

They measure all things by relation: him to her, her to him, them to others, them to them. There is no abstraction that does not contain both of them, somehow. The two of them together complete a perfect hypotenuse, equal to the sum of all other pairs adjacent to them.

Their intrinsic properties define them: laughter, warmth, the silent ease of complementary angles. They cannot be separated without distortion along the axis of their souls, the plane of their shared heart. Boundaries shift, change, dissolve as their paths merge, angles intersect again, areas mingle. Through these two points, one and only one line can be drawn, connecting, bonding, defining one entity. All other alternatives are logically impossible, emotionally implausible.

Only love can make parallel lines converge.