On Silence and Knowing Thy Self and Something Else I Can't Put My Finger On

just some existential rambling. I don't fucking know I just wanted to write something. happy thanksgiving

First dates are always the same for me. Some dark bar, short skirt, icy facade, loosening up after a first drink, hand on a knee after the second. Start to lose inhibitions at the hour mark, take a risk, ask something outrageous. Shock factor. Always whisper in their ear at some point. Feigned intimacy. An illusion of trust. Control. Whatever. I’ve been on countless first dates. There’s rarely a second because it’s not something I usually consider on the first. I guess I’m rusty at second dates. At what point do you soften? Outside the throbbing intensity of that first impression – a mutually desperate effort in proving your best self to a stranger – it’s difficult to return to myself. The first date was just having fun in a vacuum, who knows if I’ll ever see this schmuck again, but now the sun is out and we’re sober and past the small talk and we have to share time and space in a meaningful way.

This recent second date was a pleasant surprise. Despite my generally incredible poise, I’m quite a nervous person, but I felt at ease with him the whole day. We really spent a whole day together, which is a feat in itself, considering I rarely want to spend a whole day with anyone, let alone a stranger. And when I got home I fell into bed with this big stupid smile and my hands clasped, knuckles under my chin like Shirley Temple looking right into the camera with those sweet, pitiful eyes. As I replayed the day in my head, I was struck with a realization that knocked the grin off my face.

Did I say too much?

I think it’s a wholly feminine urge to be mysterious, to be reserved, in order to be physically desired. Maybe some men want to appear mysterious, but only for the sake of being mysterious, or maybe to appear smarter or more interesting than they really are. I’m afraid of some sick Lacanian fate where the more I speak – the more concretely human I become – the less attractive I must be.

I always cling onto the things I’ve said. After a date or party or important meeting or family gathering, I replay everything I said, forgetting entirely the other side of the dialogue. Why did I use this word instead of that one? Why did I tell that pointless story? Why did I share that piece of my childhood? Why was I so open? So chatty? So exposed?

There’s a scene in Jane B. par Agnes V. where Jane Birkin empties the contents of her namesake bag and a mountain of junk – though ostensibly all functional or important to the user, everyone who carries a tote bag knows its contents are mostly junk. A wand of mascara, blister packs of various medications, notebooks lined with haphazard scrawls, loose papers, tubes of lipstick, a smaller bag.

“The small one too?”

She empties the small bag. A Swiss Army knife, pens, more makeup, more crumpled papers, receipts, a Dostoyevsky book, a roll of tape.

“Find anything out after seeing what’s in the bag?” She looks up with her iconic, magnetic eyes. “When you show it all, you reveal very little.”

So I thought about this for days. It’s possible that the correlation between being known and being desirable exists outside of just my own mind. But I wanted to investigate why I have this fear of revealing too much – and God forbid, too soon. Jane Birkin articulated it in fewer words than I could. I’ve never been a woman of few words.

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We share the same stories over and over. When you start getting to know someone, the stories come out slowly, bit by bit, and I imagine that after a lifetime of knowing someone, the stories all come together to form a cohesive whole. Until then, they’re just these vignettes that are abstractly attached to a physical person, to someone you’re trying to know. I tell lots of people about the time I hitchhiked through the desert, or about the year I went as Black Swan for Halloween and spent the whole night crying all my makeup off, or about my grandparents eloping to Arkansas because my grandmother was Protestant and my grandfather was Catholic. None of these stories are me. They’re just stories. I’m not even a great storyteller.

Saying so much reveals very little, not just about yourself, but about your relationship with another person. When you really start to know someone is in the quiet moments that come long after a first impression. When you really start to know yourself is in those quiet moments too.

On the road, I went long stretches without conversation. Beyond a brief transaction at a gas station or the daily phone call to my mom, I spoke very little for several days at a time. I talked to myself out loud occasionally, but mostly my thoughts would drown out the music and there, for the first time, I was truly alone with myself. It was uncomfortable at first, being stuck with myself. No distractions. But at some point, out in that vast, terrifying, silent desert, the solitude was delicious. It was euphoric to simply be there, to know myself in those moments. To be certain that I’m still here, a whole person, without putting it into words. Without the stories, the jokes, the mannerisms I pick up around certain people, the carefully chosen words I use to prove my intelligence, the references I make to prove my cultural awareness, without all those things I’m still here. It’s hard to know that. It’s even harder to prove that to another person.

So how can you ever truly be known by someone else? Probably not by being silent together, but I’m afraid it’s not by telling stories either (which is unfortunate for a chatty Kathy like me). It certainly doesn’t happen on a second date, or a third or fourth. I assume it takes a long time. Even a lifetime. I’m left to wonder if anyone can ever really know another person, or if it’s a moot point. Perhaps that little voice that asks Did I say too much? means to ask: When can we stop talking and just know each other? It’s not that I want to be mysterious. I’m just tired of emptying my bag over and over in some tired, desperate routine, only to be seen as the mountain of junk that falls out.