I've been thinking about communication.
This has been a relatively pretty communicative week- catching up with friends, therapy, then those weird inevitable post-therapy talks with my mom in which she reminds me again to make sure that i'm telling the therapist everything, such as X and Y and Z, where X and Y and Z are uncomfortable past events my mom thinks she understands but doesn't actually know any real facts about. It's easy to hear that something happened to someone, and then fill in the blanks about what that something usually means- the ways that it's presented in movies and books. I don't blame her. I never tell her the real stories, so of course she comes up with something slightly false. I think I almost prefer the stereotypical, imagined version though. The way things actually happened can feel weirdly less authentic sometimes, as if since different from the expected, reality is wrong.
I also had a very interesting and probably overdue talk with the formerly-dreadlocked yogi musician whose life and mine happened to collide last June. I've thought it hundreds of times- how differently things would be going if only you could shave a decade and a half off of our age difference. The other day, on his couch in that weird late afternoon light that makes the world and reason discreetly turn their backs, I saw what I've known since August: age difference or none, things were going a very certain way. This time, however, Sundararaja (blatantly obvious code name) decided to point out that elephant in the room maybe both of us had been avoiding or denying. Our faces were very close, and the air from his mouth as he asked whether I ever think about how he's so much older than me felt like somewhere between a door opening and a slap on the hand. Either some feeling of complicity, of this exciting half-secret, kind-of-illicit agreement of hope, or my weird masquerade as a 30 year old falling down around my ankles, leaving me naked and very, very adolescent. Of course this was something we would have to acknowledge eventually, and in any case the conversation took some weight off of things: if everyone comes to terms with the fact that you're eighteen, they're not going to ask you how your masters program is coming.
But here's the thing: even after the whole big conversation, recognizing that yes it's weird but no neither of us really care, that things couldn't really work now but who's to say about down the line, and the final decision that things won't be serious, I had absolutely no idea where that left us. Just like how my mom hearing my curt, fumbled answers on the phone after therapy has no idea how I am, because no matter how I answer her questions I can never bring myself to say the things I mean to say and need to say. I have no true idea of my friends' realities, no matter how much detail they put into describing their dorm rooms. There's this theory that everybody's like a sphere, and we all move around hitting each other but the walls of us never uncurl: no one ever truly connects with anyone. It's terribly bleak, I know. But if we all did live in the same world, so to speak, would we need so badly to try to communicate? Of course though that's all it is, a try. And sometimes a half-assed one; we can bring someone in as much as we want, but communicate too much and it's like your skin's been peeled off in long strips of the oversaid-- and so, everything we do not say stays warm in overcoats of our throats. At the end of the day, how much has been communicated? These big talks are had, but rehashing them in your head later you realize the things that matter most are what you are still unclear about. Like where exactly Sundararaja and I are at. And what I'm mad at my mom about, and where it was that I lost track of someone's life. And what it is that I miss about Oberlin, and why home makes me uncomfortable. I have some of the answers. They're just kinda hard to say out loud.
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