The Life of Pi
Short Story
Tonight was the first Sigma Alpha Phi rush party, but the only rush I was getting was to the mathroom. All the coolest constants in my class were in attendance, and since it was the first college party, everyone was getting variable for the first time. Drinking had always been off limits in my house, so seeing all these plastered polynomials was making me nervous. My best friend f() decided to take it a step farther tonight. While the rest of us were learning our limits, he tried x for the first time and was barely functioning. I was ready to retire for the night until I saw the most gorgeous constant ever created, and the longer I stared, the more my pulse multiplied.
I knew I had to approach her, but my feet were firmly square-rooted to the ground. I tried to tell myself that there was nothing to be scared of, but I’m Pi--irrationality comes naturally to me. I was hypnotized by the way her hips swayed to Three-hanna’s voice. Just as the biggest player in the building, 69, finally gave up hitting on her, I found my opportunity. But nothing could have prepared me for her voice, a perfect permutation of sweet and sassy. My decimal began to race. I let her do the talking—mostly because it was hard to find any words. When she giggled, my decimal almost stopped altogether.
The hours ticked away, and the party was coming to a close. Time was running out, and if I wanted to be a part of her equation, I needed to act fast. At last, I mustered up the confidence to ask for her number. She smiled. My decimal skipped again. She took my hand and wrote out "e = 2.71828" in pristine symmetry. But before I could celebrate, she asked, “Could I have yours too, just in case?” My decimal plummeted. She was asking me, Pi, for my number. It was the last question I ever expected. How could I tell her my sequence, so long and without any patterns? I panicked. “You would never remember you dumb digit,” I hollered and bolted away into the night.
Years later I met e again—except this time in a very different context. She was married now, and my probability of being with her became zero. Since there was nothing left to lose, I decided to ask her what would have happened that night if I really had tried to give her my number that night in college. “You couldn’t have just approximated?” she exclaimed, thoroughly amused by my oddity, “That’s what I always do! I think it’s why I liked you so much at the time. I sensed you might have been just as irrational as me.”
For the very last time, my decimal almost flatlined. I had been so ashamed of the length of my constant, but here was e. Embracing her irrationality and her genius! If only I had rounded that night, we’d be the most beautiful equation the world ever saw. We would be whole. We would’ve both rounded to 3, and together we could have been so sixy.
THE END
1art by Pragna Gaddamedi (@prgs.jpeg)
Short Story Tip of the Day!
I wrote this in college after I got stuck with my poetry. For a while, I didn’t feel like a poem worth writing was going to come out of me, but I was disciplined back then. I decided that writing something was better than writing nothing and switched to narratives.
But why “The Life of Pi?” Few people know that my first love was, in fact, mathematics. [Here’s a picture of me with my favorite textbook 9 years ago]
Around the time I took a break from writing poems, I went back through my poetry YouTube playlist looking for inspiration. I came across a forgotten gem that I hadn’t seen since I was first introduced to poetry slam — right around the time this picture was taken. It was a TED talk by Harry Baker,
and before I even finished his first poem, “59,” the story started writing itself (if you have 3 minutes, I would HIGHLY recommend checking him out).
The writing process has not always been a fun one for me, but I can’t stay away for long. Looking back, it doesn’t feel random at all that I wrote stories, then poems, then stories, then plays, then poems, then nothing, and now here I am on Substack writing tips of the day. But every time I come back to poetry, I bring something new back with me.