Someday I'll Find My Audience

Chris’ chat window stays open on my desk pretty much all day at work, and we type back and forth throughout the day. I like having his window there because I like him, and even as a little white square, he’s good company. That isn't really because of the conversation, but because I know from knowing him that he’s hilarious and goodhearted and seeking in a precise and inimitable way. Now that I think about it, I like being friends with Chris the same way that I like his chat window’s being open on my screen. I like that he exists.

Chris’ brain goes too fast for the speed of life, which is really bad luck because the speed of his life  where he works is punishingly slow. Sometimes it feels like he has to reach to the far ends of all human knowing just to keep himself from...I don’t know what. I’m not sure what knowing keeps him from. Sometimes I feel a desperation as he pushes at the capacity of ideas like a claustrophobic gnat in a big balloon. Sometimes his chat window is many many many lines of some theory he's poking at. 

Often, I will come back to my computer, and it will say something like: “Cara, I am trying to develop a theory of languages that presupposes the inevitable influence of hierarchy.” or “Cara, I think the way that we think of zombies as a symbol for bodily alienation is played out.”

My favorite part of these sentences is “Cara,” I'm not very fussed about what comes after it, some of which is interesting and some of which is not, because I like that the person it comes from is looking to engage me.

I quit speaking with another friend last week and it is pretty crappy. If you think that you graduate middle school and girlfriend breakups are over, you are wrong, assumed female reader. Of course, it’s a little easier when one person is clearly right, and in this breakup, she was. I just overall didn’t do this friendship very well. In fact, when she called me out, I didn’t apologize and try to fix it because I didn’t want to not do the friendship anymore.

I want to say that most of my part the friendship was listening, except I wasn’t listening, a lot of the time. I was stewing while she talked.

At my job, I listen a lot to people who are struggling to express themselves. I understand that this is not a conversation, that my listening serves a very distinct purpose. They need their English to be heard by a native speaker to see if it’s working. Their part is to try to get the meaning out, and my part is to gauge how successfully they’re communicating. I almost never speak, but I’m also never bored. I understand my role in this exchange, and it’s value. They are trying to form the word “marco!” When they get it right I call “polo!” And we both know where we are.

And then in other conversations, like the ones that were most common in this late friendship, I feel that I am serving a very different purpose. Like my animated human presence is a necessary prop in the ritual of talking. In some ways, I’m doing something that only a person can do, but in other ways, a basket of laundry would suffice. Lonely and bored, at first I would hear potential “marco!”s and start to “po-” only to be run over by the bullet train of my friend’s prepared remarks. After a time, I just limited the time we’d be together- the time of my inert audienceship.

Look, I know how friendship works. If that is the situation, I have to tell her. But I pussed out and now we’re not friends. I have not a few relationships where I behave this way, and not a few friends who “jukebox” rather than converse, pulling record after record from their vast collection of prepared statements and dropping them down into the shared space. And I understand that this is their marco, because it used to be mine. My cowardly presence is a kind of bereft recognition.

But I don’t want to polo that shit.

Because I see you, and I see that authentic real-time connection is scary and I empathize with that and I know that this is your tactic for avoiding that scariness but I can’t really orient myself by it. And if I don’t know where I am, I can’t truly tell you where you are. And we’re both just kind of lost.

Chris’ window had like 60 lines worth of ideas about something that I honestly don’t remember what it was and I was not really responding- it wasn’t really required. With no engagement, he was getting frustrated.

Chris: Ugh.

Chris: Someday I’ll find my audience.

me: yeah. me, too.