When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was in love. Well, maybe he didn’t shatter it per se—more like twisted it into a knot. But there were too many “Vassiliev invariants” and “nugatory crossings” in the mathematics of it that Shiva didn’t understand, so he preferred to think about it in terms of breaking rather than knotting. Besides, he was named after a god of destruction, so “shattered” fit. Poetic license and all that.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was heartbroken. He knew it was a cliché. Only straight, monogamous people were ever heartbroken. He was supposed to have transcended silly societal norms about relationships and boyfriends and husbands. He was supposed to have a mature understanding of the complexities of human relationships. But apparently, his heart wanted to be poetic too, and promptly broke.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was sitting amid piles of his old textbooks from university, ones he hadn’t opened in years, ones he had excavated from the cardboard boxes in his closet—since, now that Cole was gone, Shiva could turn Cole’s bedroom into a home office because, maybe then, he could finally pursue that dream of being a science writer and wasn’t the accountant always going on about tax deductions and hadn’t Shiva himself always complained to Cole about needing more space? And now that he had the extra space, he wasn’t going to let loneliness or heartbreak or the memory of an ex-husband overtake it like an ugly blossom of fungus, like the mold he’d sunk his fingers into when reaching into the fridge for the oranges that Cole had wanted to add to the kombucha he’d been fermenting in the linen-closet for weeks and gods, Shiva did not relish cleaning that out and not just because he hated the yeasty smell of kombucha.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he felt like a failure. His old textbooks lay flopped out in front of him like filleted corpses spilling paper entrails and sans serif blood—Physics and Mathematics and Engineering and one lone collection of Old Norse verse he’d clung to because dammit he was cultured. They lay like broken possibilities, leering at him, smirking at him, sneering at him. It didn’t matter that he’d never liked the sciences in the first place and that working at an LGBTQ healthcare center was actually very rewarding, he still felt like a failure. It didn’t matter that Cole had told him he would never stop loving him—just not in the same way, and that their relationship hadn’t ended, only changed, and that it was nothing Shiva had said or done but that love sometimes fades—Shiva still felt like a failure. If only things had gone differently, if only Shiva had done things differently, maybe he could have made things work?

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he didn’t know what he was doing. Only that he could see the ghosts of long-forgotten Mathematics lectures hovering before him, and that he desperately desperately wanted to shake Cole by the shoulders and cry out, let me try again! Fuck you, just give me another chance!

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he didn’t think too hard about it. He just did it. The aroma of a hasty chana masala gave way to the burned-metal scent of weed; grainy wood turned into the hard, orange plastic of a subway seat. He saw Cole from a month prior, gray eyes electric with the prospect of the indie film they were heading downtown to watch, mouth poised to laugh. He knew that two weeks later, that same mouth would spill those terrible, terrible words.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was confused, because things didn’t change despite his doing it differently. He started washing all the dishes alone, in hopes that Cole would see that living with him was a delight. He offered a kiss and a compliment each morning when Cole emerged from his bedroom, to show how much he loved him. He apologized for the time he had been too caught up at his best friend’s wedding to pay any attention whatsoever to Cole. But still, the terrible words came.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream—well, he didn’t quite shatter it, did he? Again, he found himself sprawled among his textbooks, only to be once more confronted with the grip of the plastic seats and the tang of weed. He tried things differently yet again. He leaned in for a kiss before Cole finished his laugh on the way to the cinema. He took Cole to his favorite restaurant that night and announced that he was finally ready to give in to Cole and adopt a dog. But still those words, leaden gray, clunked out of Cole’s mouth. The fifth time, Shiva whisked Cole off the train, opened his savings account, and bought tickets to Paris. Atop the Eiffel Tower, he gave Cole a handjob, furtive and quick, as the city lights spun out around them. And yet, those words scuttled out of Cole’s mouth like cockroaches, unkillable, unavoidable. The tenth time Cole broke up with Shiva, Shiva screamed and hurled himself off the balcony—only to find Cole laughing into him on the subway all over again.

When Shiva shattered the time-stream, he was in love and heartbroken and confused and sad amid the wreckage of his life. But the thirty-seventh time he found himself on the subway, he let himself pause and simply look at Cole. He looked at the way Cole’s tongue peeked out between his teeth as he giggled, looked at how his glossy hair shook, looked at how his heels arched with laughter. He looked and looked and when Cole finally asked what was up, Shiva said, “I love you as infinitely as time itself, but we should break up.”

Vassiliev invariants and nugatory crossings meant little to Shiva, but he felt the knot unravel around him, soft as a kiss, sharper than teardrops.