The other day at dinner we all went around and introduced ourselves to one another. Most of the times introductions feel forced and perfunctory, a chore that we oblige, but ultimately feel obstructed by. Necessary like traffic signals or grammar or electricity bills, yes, but ultimately – tedious.
But this evening something special transpired. Maybe it was the candlelight, but I think it was more of the company – the drinks made irrelevant by our own, mutual intoxication. A group of gestures, eye creases, and back knots who – at least for a few hours – became one body.
We allowed ourselves to ooze out of the template of what we are supposed to say about ourselves. And in that way – we weren’t ourselves, we were so much more than them.
So often what is proper keeps us from what is profound. Every time the threads of a dress come undone when I crawl into it I remember there is poetry in our excess. The way language tries to envelope us, but never quite does the trick.
We talked about our life purposes, the journeys we had to get here, the things that mattered most to us. The table was a fishing rod, was an invitation, was us flopping around, gills wide open. We talked about the world we want – which meant that necessarily we talked about our pain. How we were broken up with, not just by a person, but by a planet. Our wreckage and the world we dug up underneath it.
There are few things more that I love than hearing people talk about something that they are passionate about. Unabashedly. Without restraint. Our puriticanical culture makes us so nervous about pleasure, doesn’t it? It feels positively reckless to indulge that part of yourself – a gnawing fear that your self will mold into the dreadful –ish. But there was no selfish here, there were just fish making sense of their scales.
Mostly: it’s the way eyes glimmer when they speak that gets to me. Our fixation on tears makes us lose sight of the face’s former tenant: a pupil like an egg yolk, gooey and insatiable.
Sometimes I close my own eyes and I feel like I am there, too. Sometimes feeling feels more real than anything I have ever known.
Which goes to say: we were utterly unreasonable. And the introductions, they took almost the whole time. But it didn’t matter because we just fell into each other. And we knew that no matter how we shape-shifted we would always make eyes. Literally construct them right then and there. Become that night for each other again. Somehow.
I think this is the opposite of loneliness. And I know that this is the world that I want. No – the one that I need. To keep going. To have the audacity to say “hello.”
One more time.
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