“No two snowflakes are alike,” the curve thought to itself as it floated home, “that’s a laugh.”
The curve didn’t even know why her parents made her go to school anyway. There was only thing she would grow up to be, and it was no more than she already was.
The path home wound its way through a cluster of trees at the base of the Brownian mountains. The mountains stretched impossibly high into the azure sky, capped at their peaks by real snowflakes, not poor imitations like herself.
She thought, not for the first time, about losing herself in those trees, or climbing those mountains, anything to get her away from her hum drum existence. But those trees and those mountains all led back to here. No matter how far away she traveled, home would always be with her, the same home. Some people would find this comforting, but the curve only found it boring, a life without variety, all layers the same.
The house was only a few minutes inside of the woods. Beyond the woods were the complex planes where Julia and her friends lived, stretching into infinite space and variety. The curve had tried to step onto the planes but found herself twisting and contorting, and she’d nearly given up her lunch before getting back into the safety of the wood.
Her mother was outside the house working in the garden.
“Look at these hydrangea’s,” her mother exclaimed, somehow sensing her daughter’s presence even before she announced herself. “A few more iterations and they’ll be taller than the house.”
The curve sighed but gave no other response.
Her mother looked up from her work and floated over to her. “What’s the matter dear? Another rough day?”
“I don’t want to go to that school anymore.”
“Now now, Dr. ‘brot is a great teacher.”
“It’s not the teachers, mother. It’s the other students.”
“What about them?”
“I’m not like them. Hilbert sits next to me, growing more and more full of knowledge every day. Fern’s nice but she hangs out with the affie’s most of the day. The carpet and the gasket talk to me, but no one really talks to them. And Julia…”
Her mother tilted on her point, “From the other side of the wood?”
The curve nodded, “She’s something different every day. Yesterday she was a bolt of lighting, by the afternoon she was a seahorse, and this morning she hopped around as a rabbit. Me I’m always the same.”
Her mother sighed, “There’s nothing wrong with that. Some might say that Miss Julia is a little flighty.”
“But it’s more than that. When you look at me, I mean really look at me, all you see is more of the same. No matter how deep you go, nothing changes. I don’t have any layers. Julia, on the other hand, bends a whirls and sweeps, so deep that you almost drown just to look at her. She’s infinitely beautiful, I’m infinitely boring.”
“Now don’t you say that,” her mother scolded. “I was born from chaos, Julia from complexity. Julia may possess one kind of infinity, but we have another. It’s true that the deeper you go the more you find of the same, but it bends and curves forever. You float in front of me, and yet you are infinite. If you stretched out your arms you could cover all the corners of this land. And yet, I can still hold you in myself, wrap you in a hug and not lose any of you. You’re part of me.”
Her mother moved toward her, and scooped the curve up, nestling her inside herself, next to the countless copies of her brothers and sisters. She had started on one of her mother’s far arms, but had grown until she was the center of her world.
The snowflake curved glowed brightly, the light shining through the trees into the distant mountains where one day she might find herself after all.
[BTW] : Ben Trube, Writer 