Helen And The Chemist
Alone in the middle of the night, the chemist woke himself murmuring the name of his round-faced, softly spoken Chemistry tutor. He briefly imagined the ways in which his life may have been different had he not met her, Helen, whose pale and veined hands had ushered him into a world of science and order. Before this he had been a somewhat proliferate and enthusiastic poet. It was assumed that he would follow this path into an obvious life of romantic desperation, but he lay here now a stable, wealthy and comfortable man; a man, perhaps, of more substance than character. Helen, incidentally, was a patiently voracious devourer of the classics, dreaming over her tuna fish lunch of a literary life. Frightened of her judgement, the chemist had never dared mention to her his poetry, and gave up all hope of ever writing anything that would ever be worth showing to her. Together they worked through experiments carefully and silently, his feelings for her unspoken and unacknowledged. The following summer Helen moved wordlessly to the country with her dog, taking with her a great and hideous melancholy that the chemist had only just started to become aware of. He never heard from her again, focussing himself on becoming the competent scientist that he lay as now in his bed, dreaming of her hands fluttering over flasks and forceps, and the shape of her mouth one late morning when she burnt herself during class and he had felt like crying out to her.
