The Quantum Wavefunction of Love
From right to left onstage: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella sitting independently on their respective chairs wearing their fairy tale costumes.
Sleeping Beauty: The One. Quantum Physics. Love and Relationships. Uncertainty Principle. Collapsing Relationships. Falling in love again. The One. The One? What do you think of “The One”? How do you know if he’s “The One”? Is it in his kiss, when you’re supposed to wake up from the dead? Is it destiny that it has nothing to do with the other heaven-knows-how-many maniacs pretending to be princes who French kissed me while I was sleeping for 100 years? Is he always supposed to be fully armed with swords and shields and a royal name only to slay dragons, that way all women have to be lasses in distress trapped in unsightly castles? Is he supposed to break all the spells and curses women have—and don’t males have curses and spells all the same? How many frogs did the lady in the “Frog Prince” kissed to get to the one?
Lights out.
Lights focus on Snow White.
Snow White: If fairy tale doormat damsels in distress could speak, what would they say about “The One”? Here is a diary entry of the hopelessly persevering lady in the tale called “Frog Prince” on her tireless search for her one true frog.
I’ve had it with frogs. They give you warts. I just had my 27th but I never truly found the one. I mean of course, I’ve always thought that my first frog was my first and last, my only one—while I was at it two months back. And when I got out of it, I thought it was the second, the seventh, the twenty-third and so on. All in all, I’ve kissed 27 different frogs and no two tongues taste the same. But the point is I still haven’t found the right frog.
During one instance in my frog hopping musing, I was thinking Pauli was right when he said that in a given atom, no two electrons can have the same quantum state just as you cannot not love two toads or be loved by two toads in one and the same way. It should be called Love Exclusion Principle.
My point is I wouldn’t want to negate all my past love frogs, whether they’re brutally dissected apart by now or lying dead with their blood and guts turned inside out on the streets. Because I wouldn’t be where I am now without them. See, in a lot of ways, they taught me things essential. Besides, we had our great times together. The magic was good while it lasted.
Lights out.
Lights focus on Cinderella.
Cinderella: What do our highly evolved technical scripts say about love and relationships? Love is a quantum wavefunction. It is reversible. It permeates all space. It is deterministic, that is without our meter sticks poking at it. It should be left alone without our deranged expectations-slash-equations which are predictable in theory but not in practice.
In practice, relationship, unlike love that is irreducible in nature and defies all boundaries, is subject to space-time constraints. Space-time constraints, meaning it is not non local and it is time-dependent. Uncertainty principle applies to relationships, it inevitably contains improbability. And while we’re at it; by measuring, expecting, demanding too little or too much, we break the symmetry.
Lights out.
Lights focus on Sleeping Beauty.
Sleeping Beauty: And what of Collapsing Relationships? Come again? Collapsing relationships. Collapse? Collapsed Relationship is breakup, technically speaking. It’s when the symmetry of the relationship wavefunction broke. Breaking a wavefunction is irreversible. Some things are inevitably lost and irrecoverable. If fairy tale princesses could speak, what would they say about Collapsed Relationships? Our amphibian-lover lady in the “Frog Prince” speaks out again on the collapse of her relationship with her 27th frog.
Why do frogs always leave you? I kissed all 27 frogs but no one really metamorphosed into a real prince. They all said they loved me back but then after a while, all they ever did was hop around and eat flies. I want to love and be loved completely or not at all. But lovers and frogs alike are so unkind. The more you love, the more vindictive love gets. After two weeks in the relationship, when all illusions are gone, loving becomes so much less. Can you really not live without illusions? I’ll give anything for a lifetime where love doesn’t change with time. I’ll give anything for a world where lovers love and are loved or there’ll be no lovers at all. Let parting be only for reasons of hunger, drought, plague, war, and not by the passing of time.
Lights out.
Lights focus on Snow White.
Snow White: After the tragedy, how do you recuperate from a broken bleeding heart? After one collapsed relationship, do you casually go on to the next? How do you fall in love for the nth time? Still our lady in the “Frog Prince” flagrantly speaks about her newfound 28th frog and hopefully her one true frog.
I quit my search for the one true frog after the 27th frog failed to metamorphose into a real prince. I said to myself I would never want to fall in love again. It’s too tragic. Too tiring. Too disillusioning. I was resigned to grow old alone. I mean what can I do? True love’s first kiss and happily ever after only happen in fairy tales and this isn’t one. This is real life.
But myths happen. Right they do only when the world gets occasionally tired of itself so much it would deliberately trip itself while walking. And when it gets sicker, it chooses you, it coaxes you to do a daring somersault then it takes gravity away. Only to leave you suspended in midair completely disoriented. Funny, it’s not bad dancing up there, though.
The weird thing is it happens to you just when you’ve already reconciled yourself with the eternal way life methodically oscillates back and forth like the most forlorn pendulum caused to swing forever in vacuum. Just when you cut out your strings of insistent escalating demands and start going easy with the way things are just as they are. Because the world could be real sometimes it tames you. So real like a strict instructor she crosses your name out of the class list on your 3rd consecutive absence in college. It disciplines you so that you learn to be happy with life as it is only after it has stung your eyes.
So I learned to take what the world gives me without childish tantrums or hopeless romantic expectations. And while people stare at the ceiling for whatever reason, I stare at the floor. I have no idea, I’m probably faced upside down. The world gave me something people have always yearned for. And I was just too resigned to ask after all.
I learned to enclose a portion of time and seal it in a capsule. But not forever, not years, not even minutes in an hourglass. Only moments are immortalized. Like a classic still shot of the first kiss that froze all the world’s time. Or the sweetest voice crystallized in my memory.
So it came. Resigned as I thought as I was, I wanted to live so I chose to believe again and faced love head-on. Life taught me to eat like a child. That if it gives you chocolate, take it before it gets bitter. Forget pride and cynicism, swallow the whole thing without so much as care for the world. But never ever hold too tight, chocolates melt in your hand. They drip out of your grasp.
And that’s the way with everything, that you could never really own anything. The best that you could do is to hold your love dearly because there’s never any guarantee. And as for me, I’m not asking for any. I could only be thankful it came to me.
Lights out.
Lights focus on Snow White.
Cinderella: Fairy tale princesses created their own fairy story in the first episode of the Revolutionary Chronicle, how would their characters choose to end their much too real fairy life story? The female protagonist was given an introductory script containing her background and her curse. From there, she freely knitted her own life-story quilt according to how she wants to end her tale. Here goes.
Lights out.
Lights focus on Snow White.
Snow White: I quote.
…And they lived happily once upon a time until Lady Marcella’s relationship with her then gallant and charming prince collapsed.
One day, as Lady Marcella was demurely sitting alone, meticulously chopping her sizzling pork for lunch at some posh restaurant, she overheard the ultimate dress-wrinkling poise-shattering story of her life. She immodestly eavesdropped and her eyes widened in rage. She sprawled out, pulled her hair, threw her arms and legs and roared, “Que horror! He brokeup with me and then after a year he realizes he still loves me?! Why? I was just a phone call away? He could’ve just texted me to come back, I’m only worth one peso. Que Horror!”
At home, Marcella’s castle-mate, cruel Señorita Angelina tried to jolt her friend back to reality when she said “Que horror mah cherié que horror. Isn’t that your curse? He’s the one and only one lad for you in your pathetic lifetime…” Marcella went limp shaking, went almost suicidal. “He’s going to ask you to take him back and you’ll be doing so because you’re going to fall in love with the same awful jerk twice as he breaks your heart again…thrice as he breaks it again…Repeat”.
After which, disturbed Señorita Angelina broke up with her two-week prince, moved out of their unsightly castle, ran away from home, converted to Christianity only to run away again, with an atheist lad this time. Upon receiving the news, Lady Marcella shuddered and exclaimed “Que Horror deranged Señorita Angelina, que horror! You just broke up with the last one! Don’t you ever learn?! That sexy but conceited bespectacled non-Christian lad you’re with right now is bound to break your heart. All men are! Why, aren’t you supposed to be doing your thesis? I’m afraid you haven’t learned your lesson well enough, Señorita Angelina. All your relationships never got past two weeks and never will! That, my despicably inferior lady is your curse!”
Soon after three more months, the rebound damsel of Lady Marcella’s villainous ex is still in distress. Casual and unconcerned Señorita Angelina completed her thesis, occasionally runs away from home and still unaffectedly flaunts her sexy but conceited bespectacled lover. Lady Marcella is still bitter about her collapsed relationship with her infamous ex but is trying to assuage her hurting by saying “it’s okay, he’s just my first frog anyway”. Now, Lady Marcella keeps her pretty, pretty boys she likes calling “kuya’s”.
Lights out.
Lights focus on Cinderella.
Cinderella: Thus continues the much too real fairy story of Lady Marcella and Señorita Angelina.
Lights out.
Curtains down.
