“Find x”
Alright. 150. Wrong.
The paper below me stares widely like the eyes of a fractured freight train. It is astonishing yet tantalizing. The way the intricately statured glass furrows into its once bedazzled frame, the twisted, metallic junctures of six and seven, and the lanterned encompassment of eight. I cannot place it, the quiet ambivalence overtaking the senses I once had misguided. The tormented beauty that unfolds is a rivet. It is also a shame.
There is never enough anguish I can dutifully express for my hatred of numbers. I hate them. Sure, the utter vagueness and insipid, collective loathing I wield for Statistics and soon to be PreCalculus shall forever ride on my back, but there is no true remedy for the unimaginable sorrow that awaits me when I walk through the doors of AP Calculus AB. There shall never be a remedy for my renouncement.
Even through my misguided relationship with numbers, I can never truly place my loathing for the x bar or the shrouded formula that takes on a confidence interval. I can never unwind myself deeply enough to plummet into the murk of hoarding, and I can never escape from the withered blackness that waits above the soot. The rancid sentiment, the “you’re not quite there,” and even the big, circled 70 in red pen that once sat at my desk, waiting for me. My bedazzled freight train.
To tell the truth, there is no quaint dodging that can be done to sufficiently minimize the wreckage–the disdainful hurt that sits within those two, little numbers. The crashing euphoria of home wreckage and the stilling of the verdant earth may calm me, but never my numbers. My battle with such lucrative compartments of metal has lasted me years to come. It has taken the share of ax-ridden automobiles twisting in all sorts of directions, shielding all variations of quantities, never good enough in the eyes of my cracked glass, and certainly not sustainable enough to retrieve x.
No one road is destined for the unearthing of x, and there are none I haven’t taken to arrive there. No noble encompassment along the pavement could have passed by with a basket full of gardenias, and neither would have had baked bread lingering at the doorstep below my ankles. No diminishment worth the sacrifice would have been good enough. None bright enough or grand enough, and only because I didn’t think it to be. There was no devotion placed on such an act, no dignity identified when conjoined with such numerical capacities.
My battle with numbers isn’t solely metallic and it certainly isn’t over. No anguish shall stifle me while I endeavor past linkages of chains and past crashed automobiles, but the freight train I once glided through shall never be recalled with an eye of distaste. There shall always be solidity in the face of the road, as long as I continue to search, and as long as I sustain the trekking capacity to withdraw my senses, if needed.
I shall always continue to search for x, for I shall always try to employ the cognitive approach to any obstacle that comes my way. No freight train hasn’t passed Santa Fe’s SUPER C, so no train has beaten my certificate record. My concordance consists of my breakages, terminating into sawdust and mingling sweetness through the glass. Fanciful, dreamlike wishes for such factorials and differential equations meet my reddened reality. Metallic twistings that never burned bright enough, never scarred the exterior enough for temporary longing.
The desires I hold could never prove me wrong. Nothing runs faster than a train that trusts its way. And certainly nothing faster than one that trusts itself.
253 miles per hour. All the way.
Correct.
