It began with signs only scientists understood. A boson had a mass that was .001% too high. CERN issued a press release that made the nightly news, but the blow-dried anchors only joked about how they didn’t understand math or science.

A Nobel-laureate physicist was interviewed on CNN. He drew a diagram on a whiteboard with squiggly arrows and Greek letters. Then he erased one of the arrows with the mottled sleeve of his shirt leaving pink smudges in its wake. “It’s supposed to be symmetric. It used to be symmetric. It isn’t anymore. We don’t understand why. It matters because this is all about the nature of matter.”

Wolf Blitzer nodded. “And are there any practical applications for this?” he asked.

The physicist’s forehead crinkled. He squinted his eyes and shook his head as if he were trying to dismiss an unpleasant smell. He talked about tensors and vector bundles and Lagrangian functions until Wolf said, “We’ll have to leave it there. It’s time to go to commercial.”

In high school classrooms, the students began showing their math teachers that they could draw triangles with two obtuse angles. There was some murmuring, mostly by the teachers, but it amounted to little. Nobody really saw the point of geometry.

Eleven CEOs of large corporations resigned from their positions and insisted they be jailed for financial crimes. Federal prosecutors declined to file charges but did accept their multi-million-dollar penance payments to the IRS.

But when younger children complained that milk straight from the refrigerator was boiling hot, everyone began to worry. Even worse was the coffee that turned to ice as soon as it left the espresso machine. This was becoming serious.

I woke alone to discover you had left a note on your pillow as if I wouldn’t feel the lack of you breaking me apart. I ate breakfast alone, my cereal dissolving in the percolating milk.

Two weeks after you left, the physicist returned to CNN to declare that the boson once again had the right number of volts. Milk was cold, coffee was hot. We could return to normal life as if it had never happened. Geometry still didn’t add up, but only the math teachers cared.

You are still gone. I’ve heard you’re living in New Mexico now with a new house, a new job, new friends. Maybe even a new husband. I remain alone, your absence a constant reminder that the universe is still broken.

D.A. Hosek’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Meniscus, Southwest Review, Switchback, Popshot, Blue River Review and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Tampa. He lives and writes in Oak Park, IL and spends his days as an insignificant cog in the machinery of corporate America.