Joel wasn’t very good at math, the fact was a given and he realized it. In school, he was only just learning how to divide and multiply, and all the other children seemed to be several times more adept than him. Minus all his time practicing, Joel just seemed to be several orders of magnitude better at reading and writing, with his grades as proofs. When he got back his grade card for the last exam, the average was especially low due to the outlier he had in math, and he had to improvise a softer way to sum it all up for his parental units without going off on suspicious tangents. Naturally, they didn’t find his excuses congruent in the slightest, and after some time spent discussing what to do, they derived that the best punishment for poor little Joel was to replace his nightly hour of TV time with studying.

Joel now sat alone in his lamp at the uncomfortably small toddler-sized desk that his parents had never bothered to replace, mainly due to the low priority when it was difficult to calculate their budget out in a way that made all ends meet. As he sat there pondering the problems on his page and the colorful clown patterns printed on his wooden pencil, his thoughts turned to the fact that he had never factored into account the fact that he had never tried to think of mathematics in a real concrete manner. In a flash of blinding insight, an idea came to him. He needed to stop thinking of it as just numbers of a page, but as objects in real quantifiable amounts! Armed with this new conjecture in mind, he grabbed his Legos, dumped them on the desk, and began computing.

It was a perfectly rational and simple approach that brought Joel great success on his homework, at least until he came to the issue of dividing by zero. He stared at the colorful plastic bricks scattered across his desk on top of his textbook and assignment sheet, thinking so hard that it seemed his liquefied brain would squirt messily out of his ears and nose. Was this some kind of trick question, or was there a real answer?

“How am I supposed to divide by zero anyway?” He muttered, his childish brain trying to grasp at such an irrational concept.

The light cast by Joel’s desk lamp was very stark against his dark room, and the shadows each Lego brick cast across the papers seemed to stretch and morph before his very eyes, obscuring the ink of the print and making the problems even more opaque and meaningless. In that instant, something impossible happened. In the brain of a simple elementary school boy, the undefined was suddenly defined. The shadows on his desk parted, revealing the answer in the swirling form of a spiral galaxy.

“I can see forever…” Joel whispered.