Another brick in the wall

Do you come here often?

Did I really just say that? This piece of brilliance, immediately following Is this seat taken?

On my first day as a member of a posh local social club and co-working space I’d been initially reluctant to join, searching like a 12-year-old in a middle school cafeteria for a place to sit, I come up with these scintillating opening lines as I speak to a man whose head contains the greenest eyes I’d ever seen.

I will blame those eyes, and the slow, warm smile that follows, for my blundering opening.

I sit, returning the smile.

I once read that it’s possible to quantify, using the nature and direction of facial muscle contraction and degree of skin conductance, the difference between a fake smile and one that occurs naturally, without thinking, in response to real emotion. Wild animals and algorithms can both tell these two things apart effortlessly. I wonder if the preponderance of humans have this same skill.

Based on a variety of semi-recent events – divorce, failed dating attempts, bumps in my career road which had once seemed so cleanly paved - I had begun to doubt my own capacity to read people accurately, something I’d always considered a superpower. Or worse, I’d adjusted my expectations down, then down again, to protect against disappointment, leading to more self-protection and withdrawal. And cynicism. Objectively I understood this to be a risk, and yet I had so far found myself unable, or unwilling, to break the cycle of armoring up that I, alone, had put in motion.

But these smiles – mine and his – are both genuine.

We talk for hours. I have a looming project deadline that comes and goes, but I don’t care. I learn that he works as an architect but is, at his core, an artist. His pieces hang all around us in the club, displayed as part of a fellowship he’d won the previous year. His paintings are abstract and brooding and deeply emotional. He moved here from overseas before his children were born, before he was married, before his marriage turned ugly and ended in a pile of ash. He sees his children infrequently. He seems kind, but wounded.

At some stage I need to get back to work.

Knowing, as I do from my clumsy introduction, that he does in fact come here often, I say goodbye, hopeful and optimistic that we will bump into each other again.

It’s early winter, and when I arrive at the club the next day, I can already tell the cavernous room overlooking the river will be too cold all season. I silently curse the narrow temperature band in which I operate comfortably, all thermostats, and all people (mostly men I am convinced) who control said thermostats with an iron fist and whose body temperature seems to be at least five degrees higher than mine at baseline. I suppose the one upside to this scenario is the support it provides to my assumption that I have yet to go through menopause, a belief I cannot confirm or deny with objective data because, at 50, I still have an IUD hanging out in my uterus. Initially placed during more heady times, the thing now lies dormant, serving no practical purpose whatsoever.

And then, there he is, in the same spot as the day before. His green eyes glance up, catch my own, and crinkle at the corners with that smile. He’s wearing a black sweater and a dark, cashmere scarf enveloping the base of his chin, evidence that he too must adapt in the face of the thermostat dictatorship. Absurdly, in this moment, this tiny, shared thing makes me think it’s possible that we could be wired similarly on a more fundamental level, where it counts. It’s funny, the small things we hold on to.

We talk more. At the end of the day I ask him to have a drink with me.

We sail past the crucial third date. We see each other most days, intercalating chatter and work. We do things together outside of daylight hours. We eat out. He cooks for me, running to the grocery so he can make the best shakshuka I’d ever eaten. He stays over my place sometimes. He’s attentive, takes his time. This thing is intense in its moments, surrounded by an ease that lacks the pressure to be one thing or another. I don’t notice my typical wariness. I feel good in my own skin. Confident.

Slowly, he begins to trust me. He talks about living overseas, tells me about fighting in the army. How his precision and stoicism were recognized early, leading to a reassignment to a special forces unit. He doesn’t talk about the details, and I don’t want him to. I understand the nature of the things he was ordered to do in that job. The wound I’d seen in him early on starts to take shape. It is deep, complicated and very dark. The kind of scar that can break people. Even before I stop to consider if he’d want me to, I know it is not a place I am willing to go. I slam the brakes on my natural inclination toward curiosity and dig no further.

I pull away and ultimately, we mutually decide that now is not the time for a relationship.

I effortlessly convince myself it’s for the best. I am unscathed. I take care of too many people already.

A year has passed. As I reflect on it now, I wonder, was that really my motivation? How can I expect anyone to pick up my shit if I’m unwilling to carry theirs? Perhaps the level of care and healing I imagined this man would require crossed a line for me. Maybe I’m not ready to share what lies beneath my own surface, to trust a stranger with my life, my story. Or maybe my armor has become so thick and impenetrable after so many years of practice, and I’ve convinced myself so successfully that I carry the heavy things alone just fine, that solitude has become my fate before I even noticed.

Our base, primal desire to connect, to find commonality and love and joy amongst the chaos of humanity, will in equal parts – forever - force me to both seek it and to hide from it. For so long I’ve been about black or white, on or off. It took me 50 years to see the in between. That leaves the next 50 to get the balance right.