Love Can Be Programmed, But Never Control Its Random Variables
Before Dubai, Mai lived in a city of fog and frost the kind of cold that seeped through office glass and into her bones. She worked as a data analyst for an airline company, in a world where every decision came from numbers, not nerves.
She believed everything in life could be measured by probability.
Even love.
Once, she built a spreadsheet called The Happiness Forecast Model a formula designed to calculate the chance her relationship would last three years. But when it fell apart, what hurt most wasn’t the breakup itself. It was that her formula had failed. Probability theory couldn’t explain how a warm hand one day could turn into silence the next.
Then, one morning at the airport, she met an old man who had missed his flight a retired statistician, laptop in hand, with kind, tired eyes. Seeing her staring at a tangled chart, he said gently:
“You’re searching for patterns in a world that was never meant to be predictable. Love isn’t data input. It’s a random variable one you must learn to accept, not control.”
The words stayed with her.
That night, she canceled her flight to Toronto the safe job, the certain future and booked a one-way ticket to Dubai. Not because of logic. Because her heart, for once, made the decision.
In Dubai, surrounded by desert heat and golden light, Mai became the Head of Data Analytics for a tech project. She still built models, still lived among charts and codes, but now she allowed herself to be imperfect to see beauty in the margins of error.
One afternoon, while presenting a new model, her phone buzzed.
A message from an old colleague a close friend of her ex:
“Congrats. Your chart looks beautiful.”
No hidden meaning. No past revisited.
Mai looked at the colorful curves on the screen elegant, alive, unpredictable. For the first time in years, she smiled. A genuine smile, not one plotted or rehearsed.
She closed her laptop after sending a short, sincere reply. The blazing Dubai sunlight flooded her high-rise office, washing away every ghost of fog and snow that once haunted her. She took a sip of coffee not the bitter black kind she once used to punish herself with, but a warm, fragrant cup that tasted of peace.
Her profession had taught her that life is a series of patterns and trends. But looking back on her love with Lam and on her own flight from everything familiar she finally understood that none of it could ever fit into a formula.
“Love,” she thought, “is the only random variable I’ve ever encountered.”
“I tried to predict it, control it and when the model failed, I deleted all the data. I ran away, thinking I needed a new dataset, a giant syntax error big enough to overwrite the old mistakes.”
“But that wasn’t true. The formula of love may have been right or wrong at that moment, but the outcome was never the point. What mattered were the lessons learned from every error, every fluctuation. I’ve learned that accepting pain and weakness doesn’t corrupt the data it enriches the model.”
“True strength isn’t about building a dataset so clean it has no errors. It’s about maturing through each outlier, learning from every deviation. I’m no longer the woman who measures strength by how isolated she can be. I embrace the chaos now. I accept the scars. And that has made me stronger, over time.”
Mai looked out the window. Beneath her stretched a city that never stopped growing rising like her own story, line by line, variable by variable. She placed an old lighter on the desk no longer a charm for self-reassurance, but a quiet relic of survival.
She didn’t need to go back and fix the past. She had already evolved from it.
And that, in Mai’s own formula, was the most successful kind of love she had ever known:
the love and acceptance of who she had become today
Ngày -Tháng- Năm 