The Shape of Days

I went through a bad experience recently. It’s only been in the past couple of days that I realized how bad it was.

I’m not going to go into details here, because frankly it’s none of your damn business. But what you need to know is this: I spent the first couple months of this year not being listened to.

Every day. Sometimes just for a few minutes, sometimes for hours. I talked and talked, and nothing I said got through. Maybe the person on the other end was trying to listen and blew it; maybe the person on the other end really didn’t give a damn. I can’t tell the difference, and it doesn’t matter anyway. The net result is the same. Two solid months of not-being-listened to.

Recently I’ve started talking to somebody new. A person I just met a couple days ago. And I’ve noticed something striking about myself.

I don’t want to talk.

I don’t mean that I’m uninterested in conversation. I love conversation. I crave it. I subsist on it, and when I don’t get enough, I feel deprived. Like feeling dehydrated, except instead of not having enough water I don’t have enough new thoughts and ideas.

No, I mean something else. I mean I seem to have developed an aversion to sticking my neck out. I seem to have developed an aversion to saying anything if I might care, even superficially, about the reaction I get back.

I knew I had this thing going on. I just thought it only applied to writing. I haven’t written a damn thing worth reading in weeks, specifically because I’m averse to sticking my neck out there. Not that I’m afraid somebody will hate it. But because I’m afraid nobody will care. I’m afraid nobody will even listen.

It was only today that I realized this feeling crosses over to actual one-on-one conversation, too.

She said to me today, “What’s behind the curtain?” I thought about it for a long time. Finally I said, “I don’t know if I want you to see behind the curtain yet.”

She said to that the only thing she could say: “Fair enough.”

Naturally, I’ve been dwelling on it ever since.

It’s a strange and uncomfortable feeling to want very much to make a good impression, to want very much to be captivating, but at the same time to want very much just to remain silent, because the reaction to silence cannot be indifference. If you’re silent, either the other person accepts it and is comfortable, or the other person fills the silence for you. Or the other person gets bored and goes away, but really that’s fine too. Except when it isn’t.

I used to have this little voice in my head. “This time …” the little voice would say. That’s all. It would never finish its sentence. It just left an ellipsis hanging there in my head, an infinity of possibilities contained in a single punctuation mark. “This time …” This time what? This time things will be different? This time things will be good? This time I’ll get hit by a bus because I didn’t look before crossing the street? This time what? There was never any answer. Just the quiet breath-holding moment when it seemed like anything could happen.

That voice is gone now. Or at least it’s on hiatus. It’s been replaced with a new voice. This voice says, “This time everything will be exactly like it was last time.” A complete sentence. Ending with a period. No conditions attached, no possibilities. Just a simple statement constructed in the future tense. A condemnation.

Here’s the thing: I know both voices speak the truth, in a weird sort of way. I know things might be different. I know things might be exactly the same. The cat in the box is both alive and dead, and the only way to collapse the superposition of states into a definitive certainty is to open the lid and look inside.

But I’m not sure I want to look in the box. Because as long as I don’t, as long as the box remains closed, the cat is both alive and dead. Which means, at least for now, the cat is alive. The fact that it’s also dead doesn’t change the fact that it’s alive. Both are true, at the same time.

If I open the box and find that the cat is dead, then the cat will no longer be alive. The superposition of states will collapse, and the quantum-level uncertainty — which is atrociously misnamed; it’s not an uncertainty at all, just a class of truth that’s hard for us to hold in our tiny brains — will vanish. The cat won’t be both alive and dead; it’ll just be dead. End of story.

But as long as the box remains unopened, the cat is alive. And also dead. But alive.

I think, at least for now, I’d rather the cat remain alive, even though it’s also dead. I’d prefer the cat be both alive and dead than just dead.

Of course, the cat’s not really a cat, and the box isn’t really a box, and trying to extend the metaphor puts me on a tightrope and the slightest twitch in the wrong direction will collapse the superposition of states and the cat — which isn’t really a cat — will be dead, dead, dead.

And that’s why I want to shut the fuck up.

Because every time I speak, I risk collapsing the quantum superposition. Every time I move, every time I breathe, I risk upsetting the balance of indeterminacy.

It’s very stressful being me.

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