Cool Water, or Crystallized Ice Fractals in Flight
Written by Stephen Schelling
My name is Handa, and I was born with a gift. I didn’t know it at first. I thought I was the same as everyone else, but gradually I came to know I was different. I didn’t earn it, it was given to me – that’s how a gift works. Some people are born with something called synesthesia. It’s this condition where the senses get all mixed up. One person might see a sound. Another might taste a color. My gift is different. I see mathematics – in everything. I see it in the design and construction of buildings. I see it in the wind as it blows through the waving branches and dancing leaves of trees. I see it in the engineering marvel that is motor vehicles as they move through space and time. And I see it in people: in their body shapes, in the ways they move and circumnavigate, and in the shapes of their smiles, in the geometries they inhabit. I’ve been fortunate to have people in my life who’ve helped me nurture this gift, and I, in turn, have worked hard to get to this point, this point where I am now, leaving my home of Nairobi, the only home I’ve ever known. I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life. I left to America to a university called MIT in a place called Cambridge, a place that’s far from everything I’ve ever known, a place that wants to pay for me to nurture my gift.
It all started in Form 1 (or 9th grade for some around the world) at a time when I was one of the lucky ones to even be in school. One of those fortunate people in my life was a math teacher named Mr. Ashura. He said he knew there was something special about me on the first day of class. Mr. Ashura had pulled out something he was working on as the students left the room. It was an equation. As I was leaving – last as usual because my seat was in the far back corner – I caught a glance and noticed the equation was dancing, but it was dancing all wrong. Part of it was out of step with the rest of the equation. I stopped and pointed it out to Mr. Ashura. At first he was perplexed. He realized that something was indeed wrong. I watched him think and scribble for some time, but it was to no avail. Finally, as he was about to give up, I asked him if I could try. He was surprised and seemed skeptical but offered me his pencil regardless. I took the dancing equation and rearranged the part that was out of step. Suddenly, it all moved in a concurrent rhythm, a beautiful, perfect dance. Mr. Ashura’s eyes grew, and even in them I saw the math of his eyes. A few weeks later I came into class and Mr. Ashura was beaming. My work had been correct. From that day on, he provided me with more problems to solve. This led to me entering competitions. I solved every problem and, before long, I won every competition. It was electric for me.
MIT promised to help me find an understanding of a world I’ve known by no other name than my life. They said it’ll become a degree called theoretical fractal geometry. Those words make sense to me in a lesser way than when I noticed that the waves of the ocean speak in different languages – how it depended on where they originated – and what they spoke to me in their dancing grace. Atoms have shapes and atoms come together to form shapes, to form all shapes so everything is really a shape made out of other shapes making shapes. I knew numbers before letters, equations before words, and formulas before conversations. They’re merely shapes, shapes that can speak, shapes that I understand, and shapes in which I know how to communicate. I saw those communicative shapes as I flew over the veins of the world for the first time, veins that ran through me like blood, veins that spoke in beats and rhythms.
All of this brings me to now: I’m standing outside my new home, outside of the dorm that’s been provided me, out on the lawn of presumably green grass I’ve never known nor seen, a fact I can’t see because it’s obscured by a blanket of white and complemented by a glorious dialogue perpetually falling through a minimum of three dimensions in a range 360 degrees around me. The smile and wonder on my face are mathematical expressions that no formula can fully capture, that no equation can truly extrapolate, that no number can quantify. The sky was crying tiny pieces of fluffy ice that danced and twirled, that spoke and sang, that touched my skin and revealed something to me. I know that what I see is extraordinary, that I’ve been granted access to something that’s beautiful beyond compare. I began dancing in the math. The shapes that form the shape of me joined the shapes that form the shapes of hexagonal ice, and our concurrent shapes formed new and unknown shapes. Together we spoke in the tongue of heaven’s frozen rain. My name is Handa, and I was born with a gift, but now I’ve been given a blessing, to know, for the first time in my life, the language of snow.
Postface: Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, comes from the Maasai phrase Enkare Nairobi, which means “cool water.”
The Author
Stephen Schelling is a writer and teacher, a pickler, and an Eagle Scout from America with a BA in journalism from Marshall University.