Future Archaeology

It's a tautology to point out that every relationship is a relationship, but sometimes I say it out loud to other people. It's not uncommon for most people to limit the use of the term to romantic contexts, or at least within the scope of, say, something you'd write in to a love-and-sex advice columnist about. But even that's less clear than it used to be, as anyone who has read (or more likely anymore, listened to the podcast version of) an advice column in the last 20 years. The prurient ones about people who are boning still make the spine on which the rest is hung, but it's the ones where, like, how do I talk to my grandma after she accidentally found my collection of 1950s Ukrainian fisting art photography, those are the ones that really penetrate the heart and mind.

It's an everyday prepositional phrase, especially to ones like myself prone to analysis and analyzing analysis and visiting an analyst to analyze all the analyzation, but sometimes "...in this/our relationship" catches people off guard. And I've learned to be judicial rolling it out, as it tends to be fine for some (your friends, your family, the guy you've been buying peppered turkey from at the deli counter at your local Ralphs for 15 years, the woman you've been talking to for a month after meeting on a dating app) and a cause for step-back snap into side-eye for others (law enforcement, the guy on the security gate at work, gas station homeless people in full tweak, the woman you've been talking to for 11 minutes after meeting on a dating app). But a truth is a truth: every exchange is a relationship, and every relationship is inherently a contest of power dynamics. It's a thing I learned in graduate school forced-reading Michel Foucault, and though it haunts me with the all-encompassing inescapability of it and the little corner of beckoning nihilism inherent in its promise, I tend to keep that to myself. Partly because nobody wants to hang out with a pedantic academic name-dropper and partly because that particular name has a very specific weight. If you try to worm Foucault into a conversation, you're automatically an asshole. It's like invoking Ayn Rand, but for actual smart people.

In practical terms for me, the antidote to the nihilism inherent in considering a bleak present and endless future of struggle, one against the other, 7 billion times over, every day, is that the dynamics are just that: dynamic. They shift with circumstances, they evolve in contexts, sometimes over a lifetime, sometimes over day, sometimes over the placement and intent of a sigh in the middle of a single conversation. Sometimes it's because the team you bet on took a knee to end the game and stubbornly refuses to cover the spread: your position relative to a lot of people can change very, very suddenly. A boot stomping a human face, forever, but sometimes you get to be the boot, if that's any comfort.

Because it can change, it's not a question of domination (all the time), it's more a question of awareness, understanding, adaptation and (in the best of scenarios) negotiation. And in every case, it's kinetic, twisting, knotty, advancing and retreating, developing, evolving... no more so than my relationship with my kids as they sprout into independent adulthood. My youngest moved out about 10 days ago to start college, so I'm more or less trying to figure and re-figure and reconfigure my role vis-a-vis all three of my offspring. I'm trying as hard as I can to cede my role as authority, guide, mentor and scold and understand the new interplay. Sometimes you feel like you've got it. Other times the oldest one moves back in after graduating because rent is no longer affordable for single young people. So you start over. Sometimes every day.

Romantically, I've been alone for a while, but not alone-alone. There are dates and exchanges and fits of learning and togethering and aparting. I'm nowhere near despair as all it takes is to touch the thing, to approach it even, to understand that a relationship occurs even when it doesn't make it all the way to Relationship. I'm still reaching out, still exploring, with varying levels of success, but sometimes... man, people are a lot.* And sometimes when it's working, it's almost the worst-case. It's an extraordinary thing to have your heart broken while in the full-throated, belting heights of it, to sing an exultation of ecstasy and relief, to fight to hold the note through the spasming choke of a sob in your throat; to feel a triumphant expulsion of darkness held so long in reserve, only to throw even more starkly in relief the real depths of those days without, of longing and loning, to finally have a position of safety from which to view the true shadow blacks and lurking monsters with your face in the corridors you're sprinting away from. All the infinite nights lost patching together the hilariously threadbare, fictional shelters to fend off the crushing, the avalanche that would be triggered by even a whispered acknowledgment of that bleak, pitiable thing: a human in disregard...

It's a lot. This empty nest shit will put it on you. I'm a little annoyed at the pithy adorableness of the metaphor. I'm more annoyed that I can't think of a better one. Sure, the nest is empty, but now I have my full attention to devote to watching whether or not the whole fucking tree is on fire.

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*Me included. Or me especially, for me at least. I'm the one who has to deal with me in all the possible outcomes.