Sine and Signs
I was sitting across from my oldest friend when the words just spilled out of me, like a dam had finally cracked.
“You know,” I said, swirling the tea in my cup, “they always taught us that math was found in nature as if it were something hiding there, waiting to be discovered. But they never told us the real secret.” I leaned in, voice dropping to a whisper, as if the truth needed gentleness to land.
“Math isn’t just in nature. Math is nature.“
She blinked at me, and I could see the gears turning. I smiled, remembering the thousand tiny revelations that had led me here, the way my heartbeat followed a rhythm too precise to be accidental, how the sun rose and fell like a perfect, breathing equation, how even the spirals of my hair curled with a sacred geometry.
I was born loving mathematics. Numbers, patterns, the beautiful inevitability of it all it was a native tongue I spoke before I even understood what language was. And thank God for it. Math became my shield, my sword, my way out.
When racism said, “You don’t belong,” math said, “You do, right here, right now, exactly.”
When sexism sneered, math sang louder, a symphony of logic and proof no bias could refute.
When poverty laid down walls, math carved tunnels straight through them.
I needed that music. Especially as a Black woman in America, where every step forward often feels like an act of rebellion. But even now, I need you to understand math isn’t just the cold, mechanical thing they make you memorize in school. It isn’t just symbolic manipulation and exams. It’s the very language of the universe the cadence of existence itself.
And when the darkness of grief swallowed me whole, when I couldn’t tell left from right or future from past, I turned not to the signs from popular culture, the empty promises of fate or fortune. No, I trusted the sines, the deep, ancient heuristics hidden in the waves and the curves of life itself.
The rhythmic certainty of a sine wave up, down, equilibrium. It was my quiet compass when emotion threatened to unmoor me. In the sines, I felt the pulse of something bigger, something infinite and intelligent, yet grounded in the laws that govern everything from the flicker of fireflies to the spin of galaxies.
It gave me permission to explore without losing myself.
It tethered me to a realism sturdy enough to keep me from drowning in allusions that could have easily turned into delusions or illusions.
Because it’s one thing to look for signs and symbols in the world around you, and it’s another thing entirely to understand that you, too, are written in the same sacred mathematics. Every breath, every sorrow, every laugh, an equation unfolding across time and space.
In that darkness, when the world had emptied itself out, I didn’t need fairy tales or fortune cookies.
I needed the music of the universe humming low and true.
And math, my first love, my fiercest ally (almost) answered back.
