NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS TO BE

You lust after water. It could be any liquid, but for the sake of familiarity let us consider water. You lust after water. You love the way it greets your hand when you dip it in, the way it swirls around your fingers. After completing the chapter on boiling (specific temperature under a given pressure, source of heat necessary, takes place throughout the liquid), you are interested in evaporation.

As I said, you lust after water. Only the liquid form. Not ice, not vapour.

You have had water for some time. You don’t want it to vaporize away. You know the laws of boiling and you confidently make arrangements accordingly, bringing down the temperature of the water to a bare minimum. You fight hard, because the colder it gets, the more it tends to pick up heat. But you fight hard and you are patient and don’t give up and you keep trying and you cool it all down and the molecules of the liquid are less agitated. You are contented that you will have liquid water for ever.

You never knew about evaporation.

The water starts disappearing. You look frantically all over the place for any holes through which heat might be getting in, any malfunction you overlooked, any fault on your part. You try all measures, you go crazy cooling it down, and still it disappears. The liquid that churns inside the nooks of your heart in eddies and vortices of affection and desire transforms in front of your eyes into tendrils of pale vapour, a ghost of the water, melting into air, and you can do nothing about it.

Before long it is done. There is no more water. It never took any heat from anywhere. And it left you a present, the answer to wherefrom it got its heat — a chunk of ice. A chunk of frozen indifference, a block of coldness that won’t swirl, that won’t caress your hand as you dip it in. You try, and are gifted with frozen, painful, numb fingers. You cannot throw it away because it is part of the much-loved liquid you have lost, and all you can do with it is hurt your fingers and freeze your warm palms, but you still won’t throw it away.

That is all that remains with you. All that remains of the water you believed won’t go away, because you weren’t boiling it. Because it was cool.

You realize that your cooling it down never mattered. If you won’t give it any heat, it takes it from itself.

Then there is another part, the vaporized part. It will condense somewhere. Maybe some other place.

You run after it.

<IN ACTUAL PHYSICAL EVAPORATION, IF THE PRESSURE ON THE LIQUID IS NOT VERY LITTLE, SUCH VIGOROUS VAPORIZATION, WHERE PART OF THE LIQUID FREEZES BECAUSE OF EXTRACTED HEAT, WILL NOT TAKE PLACE. BUT AGAIN, THIS WAS NOT MEANT TO BE AN ACCOUNT OF ACTUAL PHYSICAL EVAPORATION. NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS TO BE.>

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