Tonight was the first Sigma Alpha Phi rush party, but the only rush I was getting was in the pit of my decimal. All the coolest constants in my class were in attendance, and since it was the first college party, everyone was trying to get variable for the first time. Drinking had always been off limits in my house, so seeing all these plastered polynomials was making me nervous. My best friend f() decided to take it a step farther and tried x. By the end of the night, he was barely functioning. I was ready to retire for the night until I saw the most gorgeous constant ever created, and the longer I stared, the more my pulse multiplied. She was incredible.

            I never imagined I would fall so soon because finding the one had always come second to me, Pi. I knew I had to approach her, but my feet were firmly square-rooted to the ground. I tried to tell myself that there was nothing to be scared of, but irrationality was in my blood. I was hypnotized by the way her hips swayed so effortlessly to Thri-hanna’s voice. I found my opportunity to approach after the biggest player in Sigma, 69, finally gave up hitting on her. As he hobbled away, presumably to throw up, I moved in. But nothing could have prepared me for her voice, a perfect permutation of sweet and sassy. My decimal began to race. I let her do the talking—mostly because it was hard to find words. When she giggled, my decimal almost stopped altogether.

            The hours ticked away, and people started leaving. Time was running out, and if I wanted to be a part of her equation, I needed to act fast. Politically, my parents had always been too far positive on the number line, so this was the first girl I had ever talked to. At last, I mustered up the confidence to ask for her number. She smiled. My decimal skipped. She took my hand and wrote out “e = 2.71828” in pristine symmetry. But before I could celebrate, she asked, “Could I have yours too, just in case?” My decimal plummeted. She was asking me, Pi, for my number. It was the last question I ever expected. How could I give her my number, so long and without any patterns? So instead, I panicked. “You would never remember you dumb digit,” I hollered, and bolted away into the night. 

            Years later I met e again—except this time in a very different context. She was married now, and my probability of being with her had become zero. Since there was nothing left to lose, I decided to ask her what would have happened that night if I had tried to give her my impossibly long number. I waited intently for her response, but suddenly she began to laugh. “Why couldn’t you approximate?” she exclaimed, thoroughly amused by my teenage irrationality, “That’s what I did! I think it’s why I liked you so much at the time. I sensed you might have been just as irrational as me.” For the last time, my decimal almost flatlined. All I had to do was round? All I had to do was round! Everything began to fall in place. I had been so ashamed of the length of my constant when I didn’t realize how much power it truly gave me. All I had to do was round! If I had rounded that night, we could have been the most beautiful equation the world had ever seen. We would have been whole. She would have rounded to 3 and same with me, and together we could have been so sixxy.