Chaos Theory

Prompt: Chaos

As she watched the chaos of the scrum, she was reminded of the Universe. Yes, the Universe, home of all suns and stars, moons and rocks and fire and plants and lifes and deaths. How it came to be; and that perhaps there was nothing that preceded it. How from the chaos of the Big Bang, a sense of order, a set of physical laws, and billions of completely unknown and unseen worlds that were somehow still predictable, came to be.

Yet a butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico could cause a hurricane in China, supposedly. A woman brushed her hair, and reminded her husband of his mother, and he turned away from her in the night, and she was cold in the morning and would not speak, and he went to the game upset and angry, and pushed too hard, and was thrown out of the game, and the team lost.

But before that, all the scrums. All the rugby-firm bodies in a tangled, chaotic battle that always, suddenly ended, and the ball was retrieved and someone took it down the field and was tackled, or scored. Then they shook hands and left the field. Order followed chaos, Envy thought.

Maybe that’s what was happening with her and Marcus. The nothingness in her life before him. Then the explosion that was their courtship. The fights, the drama, and a marriage that was like a twisted scavenger hunt, with inscrutable clues and false treasures.

Maybe the chaos was necessary for the peace that followed.

The rules were the same. It was predictable, too, she realized. Unless, across the ocean, a butterfly fluttered its wings.