In The Rooms

The benefit of experience isn't so much in the silken luxury of slow wisdom, wrapping oneself in a warm, form-fitting and sharp-looking armor of reliable decision-making in the face of crises (or even just indecision). What you learn isn't that the things you will do will be the smart option more often than they ever were. The hit rate tends not to improve much; it's not like there are fewer variables or less of the tyrannical bloody-mindedness of fickle luck. It's more along the lines of taking it in stride when your stride lands in yet another open manhole.

As a single person of course, the opportunities for manholes are notably higher, both in the metaphorical sense and the literal one if you're oriented in that direction.* It's one thing to just move through life dealing with the mundanity of the prosaically outrageous, of which there is of course a lot. It's not much of a revelation to say it's exponentially more complicated when you face down another person (if you're at all empathetic or just in possession of enough authentic good faith to be interested and/or not a sociopath). You automatically open yourself up to all the vagaries and complications that another person introduces. What if, by random example, that person is a relatively new recovering addict, just past the threshold of being able to responsibly try dating finally, and reckoning with a lifetime of evasion and chemical mediation of trauma and pain minus (for the first time ever!) the option to retreat to the willing stupor of dulling agents?

If it sounds like a lot, it can be. And maybe it will predictably end fairly quickly, abruptly and in neither triumph nor ignominy, but in a way that in retrospect just felt inevitable all along, as all endings do. We are narrative animals above all else, after all. Tying ourselves to others is to reckon with their reckoning, and then to face down all the exciting, silty bog-water that churns up clouds of particulate detritus you'd thought had long decomposed into nothing as you sit alone in the event's wake.

But as you do so, on your own again, vision obscured, breath held, you know very soon the settling will begin again and you'll know the god-rays of filtered sunlight are out there, looking for you, even if you can't see them yet. There's no panic or thrashing. It's not even unwelcome. It's a place of calm and quiet, not because you know you did everything right, but because you know there's always another chance to fuck something else up again. Or get something right! Probably really soon!

Besides, there's no hiding from reckoning. To be a citizen is to reckon. All places have a history and most of it is awful, rooted in exploitation and human blood. To be a person is to reckon, with survival and connection and all the tactile and abstract in creation, potentially. I guess that's the allure though. All of it, potentially.

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*A late but joyous Pride to you, by the way!