My Theory

Here’s my theory, I told her.

My theory is that everyone has, like, a core, you know, like they have a part of themselves that no one and nothing touches. That no one will ever touch, or even see, or even know about.

With you so far, she said. I worried I was sounding a little like a stoned tenth-grader.

Yeah, and, like, so, everyone has that core, but everyone also has all the other stuff surrounding it, like their favorite music and their jobs they’ve had and their breakups they’ve had and their families and all that. That’s layered at different places around the core. And people will be sort of…I’m not sure how to say this, but, like, people will be sort of variously permeable. Up to the boundaries of that core, you know, like some people will tell you about their threesome on Twitter and then some people will tell you, ten years after you met them, that they were adopted or that they’re allergic to pinenuts and that’s why they never want to eat your minestrone that you make because it has pesto in it.

Mmmm hmmm.

I don’t even know where I’m going with this.

No, it’s like…well maybe it’s like you can know someone but not really know someone? Or only know them so far? Or for a certain time until you realize you don’t know them, or that you’re edging up to that impermeable core thing, and there’s just too much information in that impermeable core thing, and…wait, yeah, I don’t know where you’re going with this either.

What are we even talking about? I said.

I had meant to say something meaningful. I had wanted to let her know I understood, kind of. As much as I could, but probably not as much as she needed me to.

I had wanted to tell her that it’s perfectly reasonable to feel all sorts of different ways at the same time, even though we’re in our thirties now and should have, supposedly (but according to whom?) settled down, emotionally speaking. I wanted to tell her that the most effective way I’ve found to stop people from breaching your perimeters is to be so extroverted and out there that no one ever thinks to ask you anything uncomfortable because surely after you’ve tweeted about your threesome you can have no secrets left, right? I mean, right?

I wanted to tell her that weirdly, I don’t think she’s alone in feeling alone. It’s a strange thing to share with other human beings. We’re all kind of grooving around together, knit together by the blood and guts on the outside edges of the core, listening to music and going to our jobs and being in our families and breaking up and getting together and trying to remember to pluck our eyebrows and petting our cats and working in our gardens, all convinced, still, even though we’re not in tenth grade, all of us (mostly) positive that no one understands us. Probably we’re right in that, mostly right. Bizarrely enough, we have that in common with (probably, almost) everyone else.

I thought, for a minute, about walking along the street on the way home from the bus stop, looking up at the clouds in the sky through my own two eyes, in the world and in my head at the same time. I thought about that feeling you get when you go along the overlapped edge.

But how can you say that? I couldn’t quite say that. This isn’t even a theory, really, I don’t know what I’m trying to say, I said, and we laughed and yawned and called it a night.