connections

on context, capacity, vibes and time

A smokes a cigarette on our front porch every morning. I pass her on my london fog with one shot of espresso, half sweet run doubling as B’s walk every morning. B stops to piss on the same bush every morning. She says “I really don’t smoke that much” every morning. I say “never count American Spirits, especially the yellow ones” every morning. She bites the left side of her lip when she smiles every morning.

In the wild, I meet an average of 37 new people a week. I know this because I track their names and how I met them and something unique to them I’ve never encountered before on a note in my phone. Back when I believed in the spectrum as other rather than continuum, I got diagnosed with it. I do have a lot of special interests, but people is the only one special enough to never lose interest in. I love studying people — deconstructing that unique and multifarious mix of needs, motives, preferences, priors, idiosyncrasies, neuroses, gifts; reconstructing the integrative whole. I love studying how people change. I love studying what triggers people to change. More than anything, I love walking with the people I love through change.

M wears a proper suit every Friday and pours tea from a kettle and always brings the chocolate eclairs I mentioned I liked once. He tells me about cracks in the moon, google’s blindspot, and how a woman he fucked on an airplane provoked desperately running from a knife-mouthed soldier. He paints french impressionist tulips we planted and B lays on his feet. Sometimes, he lets B lap a lick of tea from his cup.

My friends say I get more inbounds than anyone they know. Weird flex? Probably. Definitely an uncool thing to say on the internet, the place people come to self-organize around their preferred scarcity problem, often reciprocal love. But attention is simply attention, and it’s not love. Still, I don’t even think my friends mean it as a compliment. But we turned it into a game. Price is right rules my bumble likes, loser buys a round. No one ever busts. I’ve rendered the apps unusable until they make better filters. Who the fuck is selecting on star sign? But I haven’t deleted them yet. Sometimes I like to stupidly slide through my collection of 10,537 smiles. I like to study how so many different people approach connection.

T always has my drink ready before I arrive. She nicknamed it the London Smog and says it’s disgusting. We flirt and share anecdotes about Mother. She compliments my gold earrings when I wear them, so I started wearing them more. Then I noticed she did, too.

People say people are inherently the same. I’ve found people to be so different. Which is what makes connection so special, like the right wavelengths converging in a moment of light. There’s the passing connections — good vibes, right time, enough context, compatible capacity. There’s the persisting connections — any vibes, long time, too much context, deepening capacity. I prefer the latter (love), but get by most days on the former (fun).

M pulls a pillow over her face and tells me I’m self sabotaging. She’s been coughing all weekend leaving us both sleepless. I get defensive, something about how I don’t see it that way, I’d prefer curiosity into my experience over assumptions, I’m allowed to have different values, blah blah. We’re typically growing differently, so our projections typically stretch each other’s capacity. Loving her teaches me to love everyone better, one of the many reasons I love her. We’re holding hands again by morning, also typical.

Sometimes I get a little teary-eyed thinking about how each precious moment of connection compels. So many realized desires are drawn out by the people who found them in us before we ever did. As the collective integrates, so does the individual; as the individual integrates, so does the collective. We don’t become same, we become whole.