Looking at Love Lost

We were made for each other
Of that I had no doubt
Held close in a cozy subset
That kept all others out

We meshed in orderly fashion
My odd to your even
An integer partnership
Something we both could believe in

We counted by twos and fives
Enjoying addition and subtraction
Multiplication was fun
But tension at division became action

You started talking to letters
And then with them held hands
You said it was my imagination
But you cancelled all my plans

When I had a problem
You said it was easy to solve
Add an imaginary number
And let my mind evolve

Differential equations
Is where I drew the line
But by then you were tripping
With tangent and cosine

Then I knew you were evil
That was the final straw
You had killed all my love
Taken up with physics rule of law

This is for the second prompt in the NPM21 scavenger hunt – write a poem about lost love. It was my sophomore year of High School when my love for mathematics started to die. I was taking trigonometry and geometry and just couldn’t get a grasp of the what and why for. By the time I was in college and taking calculus I knew for certain that all love was dead. I felt betrayed by numbers. Math had started taking drugs. It was into imaginary numbers like i and into strange signs and symbols. Without so much as a goodbye, my love ran off into the night. It took many years before I could think of math without sorrow and anger. Today we are passing acquaintances – civil and polite but never an ounce of love.