I can't remember a time when I wasn't in love with Cassie. But it's not like forgetting what I did yesterday. It's more like it's always been there, so far back in my mind it's the first thing I ever knew.

My life started when I fell in love with my best friend. That sounds like an allegory, but it isn't. My earliest memory, from when I was five, is of looking at her and feeling right.

You could say my life has a three-act structure: a prologue, when I was too young to realize what love was; a first act, when I tried to seduce her; and an epilogue, when we're finally married and happy.

I thought it would be easier to get there. But the timing is never right. I am stuck in the middle of the story.

My phone alarm rings. It's time for lunch. I check the date. Tuesday already? I thought it was the weekend just yesterday. I guess that was the day before.

So, I open my fridge and find the sandwich labelled "Tuesday." Fine, I prepared it this morning, but I was going to eat it today. I wasn't going to label it "Today," right? That's confusing.

The radio is on at a low volume. It has to be, or Mrs. Paterson would complain otherwise. It's Cassie singing one of her songs. I can hear her words on the speaker.

I turn it up.

"But I can't find it. Maybe the dryer ate it?" she sings.

I don't get art. My sandwich, that is art. The bread, perfectly aligned. The lettuce shielding the gluten from the tomato and the thin layer of mayo, but also the cheese over the three slices of ham.

It has to be three, because each slice is a third longer than my pieces of bread. By folding the top and bottom slices in opposite ways and cutting a thin strip of the middle slice to place in the middle, I can have exactly 4 layers of ham on the whole sandwich. That is optimal stacking. It's like a bonus piece of ham: 4 for the price of 3.

I also cut my huge tomato slice into four quarters so the sides align with the bread. Sure, there is a gap in the middle, but there are more sides than middle.

The two layers of lettuce are harder to align, but it's easy to cut lettuce, and it is mainly isolation. Lettuce, after all, isn't a 3-dimensional object any more than a sheet of paper. It's just there, not adding substance to the sandwich.

The most important thing is to cut diagonally. A diagonally cut sandwich has more content than one cut orthogonally. I can't explain it, but it's true.

"I guess I'll put on other shoes, without socks, a perfect metaphor for the emptiness of my heart," sings Cassie in the last verse of her new song.

I never understood that one. Well, I didn't understand the previous one or the one before that.

Cassie's lyrics must have meaning, but no matter how I chart them, there's no clear logic. Maybe she didn't optimize her metaphors.

Taylor Swift, I do. Olivia Rodrigo too. Even Pink. But Cassie, the woman I love? Nope.

Take Olivia's song "Good 4 You." It has a clear structure. She says how good it is that he "moved on effortlessly," how he "got a new girl," and so on. But then, she sings, "Not me, if you ever cared to ask."

I get that. Maybe if Cassie's songs had a more aligned structure, like Verse 1: I feel sad, Verse 2: I can't find my socks, Verse 3: I don't wear my socks.

I sit at my table, replacing the placemat to align perfectly.

"Maybe I should have stayed in bed," she sings at the end of the song. The radio switches to a commercial about mattresses on sale at the corner of 4th Street and 6th Avenue, as if connected, but I know that this ad plays every hour.

As I bite into my sandwich, I visualize 4th Street and 6th Avenue and recall that there are 3 mattress stores there. Why? Are there enough people buying mattresses to justify 3 stores? But then again, not far from my apartment, there are seven car dealerships and almost none anywhere else in town.

"Cassie announces new dates for her tour, adding May 4th in Indianapolis and May 9th in Los Angeles. We have tickets for the 6th caller with the proper name of her tour for the May 23rd show in town. Lines are open now."

I look in front of me. I have my ticket for May 2nd in Indianapolis and for May 8th in LA, but my ticket for May 23rd, the only one I plan on attending, hasn't come yet. Maybe this week.

The sandwich is perfect. Like always. I open my food journal between the two halves, and I find the page for April. Using my pen, I fill in the 3 circles I prepared for today in the column "Lunch." This month was good... all my sandwiches were perfect.

I check for March and see that I had one day when my tomato had rotted overnight. That threw me completely off balance. How can I work in the afternoon without a tomato in my sandwich? And how can I work in the morning, knowing there wouldn't be a tomato in my sandwich?

I eat my second half. It's exactly as good as the first one. My sandwiches are always symmetric. That's reassuring.

Anna won the pair of tickets and yells so loud that there is unpleasant distortion in the radio. I sigh as her voice is annoying, and odds are that she will be within 3 or 4 seats of mine. Radio station winners are always right in front of the stage.

Worse, sometimes they can go backstage too. Most are nice, but Anna has an annoying voice. Did the host mention backstage access? I don't think so, but I didn't pay attention. I was focused on my sandwich, and Anna stole my concentration.

The sandwich is cool, but not cold. Optimal temperature.

Oh, will Anna try to explain to me the lyrics with her annoying voice? I hate when they do that. She will probably just scream at the top of her lungs. Statistically, they only do that. Scream. Mrs. Paterson would hate that.

I lower the volume of the radio. I don't turn it off as I like how it drowns out the noise of the compressor in the fridge. It's not that it's unpleasant. Rather, it's that it's unpredictable, and sometimes, I think it's coming from one of my projects.

I put my plate in the dishwasher. I will need to run it tonight as it's starting to smell. It's earlier than usual. It must be the summer arriving outside, or perhaps one of my transformers makes a lot more heat.

I survey the kitchen before returning to work. The dishwasher and fridge are properly closed. Only the two tickets and three of my notebooks (and their pens) are on the table. My placemat is back in the drawer, and all the cupboard doors and the drawers are closed. Good.

I leave for my workshop. It's in my old bedroom, but Mrs. Paterson didn't like the noise of my lab above her bedroom, so I inverted the two bedrooms. She wouldn't like the day I moved, so I bought her flowers to soothe her.

I fail to see why flowers, which make no noise, help cover the noise, but they did the trick. She was smiling when I ran into her after the move.

My test succeeded over lunch. I have successfully built my first 34-qubit Quantum computer.

Now, 34 is a weird number. I could, in theory, make more, and in reality, you can't do much with only 34 qubits.

But the EU banned in the Wassenaar Arrangement the export of quantum computers with more than 34 qubits for some reason, and my client is in the EU.

You might wonder, if I am in the USA, why would I care about the export laws of the EU? Simply because I am the designer, not the builder. My client hopes to mass-produce my computer to export them.

What can they do with them? That's not my problem. At this low power, they can't even begin to think about breaking encryption keys, but many circuit simulations would be vastly improved.

Well, vastly is a big, imprecise word. Why do marketers like to exaggerate by using vague words?

I don't get quantum computers. Not fully. I can build them, but to build something, you don't need to fully understand how it works, just how it's built.

Do carpenters fully understand how a wooden frame can hold a wall? Can a plumber fully grasp how pressure from a water tower distributes water?

Maybe. Perhaps it's just me who asks such questions.

In all cases, qubits, or quantum bits, unlike normal computer bits, allow for superposition.

Oh boy. This is where they lose me. A computer bit, that's simple, is 1 or 0. It's true or false. Cassie isn't my girlfriend, 0. Cassie doesn't want to be my girlfriend right now because she lives in California.

But a qubit is made of both values? It's like when I mount in my head a scenario with Cassie.

If I moved next door to her, she wouldn't say no to dating me because I lived too far away, but that doesn't mean she would say yes. After all, we used to be almost neighbors, in the grand scheme of things, and she didn't want to date me. The timing wasn't right then either.

With this quantum computer, I could model up to 34 such variables and simulate if she would date me. I get that. I do!

What I don't understand is how this collapses into meaningful data.

I start a few test runs. Just because it ran once doesn't mean it will always succeed, even if, as part of the test run, there are thousands of repetitions.

I find my task book. I check the checkbox for this task on page 26. The rest of the tasks for this project are for later.

• Write the schematics,
• Find the right box to ship it,
• Take the export pictures, and

  Contact the client.

That would all wait.

I check page 25. All is checked on it except "cash the check." I didn't get it yet, but I should later this week.

Wait, I ate lunch. I put the notebook down and get to the mirror in front of my door.

I have a shirt, I have pants, but my hair is undone, I am not shaven, and my feet only have socks on them.

I smile, seeing that I have both socks today. It seems I didn't lose any, unlike Cassie.

Is Cassie unhappy? All of her songs feel sad. Like she is missing something from it. Sometimes, I wonder if it's me who is missing, but she rejected me. Perhaps I should move next to her? If I knew the other variables, I could simulate it.

I put my shoes on, and I open the door to go downstairs.

One floor down, I see Mrs. Paterson's door, with her name written in cursive letters and flowers drawn by hand.

I keep going. She asked me if I was autistic one day. I know, I wrote it in a notebook. But the reality is I'm not autistic. I just realized in college that if I didn't write everything down, I would forget it. So I started writing everything down. That's just good practice.

As I walk downstairs to the lobby, I think back to before I kept organized notebooks.

I wasn't a good student in high school. I did ok, I suppose, but nothing stellar, usually just below the class average in just about every class.

In college, I discovered that if I wrote everything down, I didn't have to juggle all the things I needed to remember. If I prepare my sandwich in the morning, lunch becomes a solved problem. If I lay my clothes out in date order, dressing becomes automatic. By adding a routine, I leave more room in my mind for my job and for my creation process.

At parties, I have fun with everyone. I go wild like them, and I connect with them. I can make eye contact, I can flirt, and hey, I even had sex, just not with Cassie. And people have fun with me! I do get invited to parties, just less often now that we are adults, but that's normal. People have kids, careers, and partners. I guess I have a career, and I am working on the other two.

The reality is that I am a below-average man with below-average intelligence who can get organized well enough to complete world-class projects. That doesn't make me autistic. It makes me focused.

And focused I am. I am not obsessed like autists; I am more like efficient. Fine, maybe with sandwiches, but I found the secret to the perfect sandwich... Why not just use it? It's a build project too, just delicious instead of functional. Well, it does deliver energy, but it's not more efficient than an imperfect sandwich.

I know I'm not brilliant. Just good at being prepared. I wish that was enough to make Cassie love me, but it isn't. Still, my sandwiches are perfect. There is always that.

The check didn't make it, but I did have a new letter I didn't recognize. It has a local return address, but no name. I used to open the letter in the hallway until a girl I once dated sent me glitter in the mail. It took days to fully clean the hallway to Mrs. Paterson's satisfaction.

Not that she was too strict, but glitter is just that difficult to get rid of.

I liked that girl, but I didn't love her. Almost everything was right, but she wasn't Mrs. Right. That was always Cassie.

I didn't break up with her, and for the record, she didn't break up with me either. It's one of those superpositions. We hadn't technically defined our relationship, and when we realized it wasn't working, we just, well, stopped seeing each other without technically breaking up. And yet, we are clearly not dating anymore.

Am I the one who got away for her? No, I am not an idiot. I knew I couldn't be the man she wanted me to be. I couldn't remember every confession she made, every story she told me, or every restaurant she liked so I could invite her to them.

Furthermore, I would have needed to take notes on our dates. Since I know I am not autistic, I knew it was not proper for me to do that. But if I focused as much on her as she needed me to, I wouldn't be able to do my job.

At least I was honest. Well, honest enough. I didn't admit I was basically an idiot, in my own opinion. She said she understood, but she didn't. No one does. Well, almost no one. Mrs. Paterson does, and Cassie does too. She knew for a long time.

I get back to my apartment and open the letter. No glitter.

She wasn't angry at me. In fact, she was happy. The glitter was put in the envelope to make me like her more. She thought it was cute. In a way, it was. I thanked her. We even dated a few more days, breaking up after the accident in the hallway but before Mrs. Paterson gave me a muffin to thank me for a job well done cleaning up.

I hadn't told her about the accident. It wasn't the cause of our breakup. Cassie was.

I sigh. In the envelope is a ticket for Cassie's show on May 23rd. Middle of the first row. With it is a backstage pass, but it's laminated, and there is no lanyard. Awkward.

My name is on the backstage pass. That's new. For the other two days, it's printed on the tickets.

If I had gotten two tickets by mail, I might still be with my ex. She was shocked, as Cassie's number 1 fan, that I had bought a front-row ticket for me but not for her. I couldn't tell her Cassie sent it to me. You don't mention the actual woman you love to the woman you are dating.

But the thing is, she never mentioned being a fan of Cassie. I would have remembered that, if only because that would have been the end of that relationship.

I can't date a fan of the woman I love because that would be too weird, no? Like, one day, Cassie is in town, drops to see me at my apartment, and my date of the time becomes a hysteric fangirl?

Not that she never saw me with a date. I even brought Isabelle to the launch of Cassie's second album. That was a girlfriend, not just a date like Glitter Girl. Maybe I am imagining things, but after that day, I stopped getting pairs of tickets.

Of course, correlation is not causation, but still. I wonder what happened to Isabelle? Right, she saw in my eyes how much I loved Cassie at the album launch.

I put the ticket with the others. I have to figure out what my next project is. When I'm not working, my mind drifts into places it shouldn't, like a machine left running with no purpose. It's easier to feel useful than to feel ordinary.