12 observations of people i know - by shani - skin contact
A little over a year ago, I wrote 21 observations from people watching. Writing it felt light and easy, most of it done in one sitting.
This was much harder. The first piece was about noticing things rippling on the surface and wondering what deeper currents moved underneath. This piece pulled me under.
cross-pollination. watercolor. shani 2023.
- You complain about your partner by taking each and every one of his flaws and putting it under a microscope. You test the sharpness of your perception against every human quality he has. You are one of the most intelligent and sensitive people I have ever met, but fear makes you myopic. I know the harshness you have towards others is a mirror of how you speak to yourself, which is a mirror of how someone spoke to you once when you were young and did not deserve anything but gentleness. Still, I want to shake you sometimes and say: yes you are brilliant, yes everything you say is true, but there are a million true things around you, all the time, that you could notice instead. Is this really where you want your attention to go? To have the ability to see in the dark and to only look for what is missing.
- Since I’ve known you, it has always felt like you have a splinter pressed under your skin. Maybe it has been there so long that you no longer remember what it was like to not have it. But it seems like you are used to life containing this low-grade pain all the time and that pain makes you more irritable and unkind. I can’t help but wonder who you would be without it.
- Your natural state is breathtaking. The way you look at the world and find beauty in its strangeness and cracks. Just being near you makes me feel more buoyant. In college we’d take road trips where you have a camera strapped around your neck, and we’d park in ridiculous places for the perfect photograph. It was always worth it. You’ve been working a job you hate for a few years now. I feel a deep sense of loss, because the world has enough business analysts and product managers, but only one of you. And I’ve never seen you more yourself than when you are holding a camera, chasing light.
- I’ve watched you stuck in the same pattern for years. Indecision, to be succinct. Despite talking about how much you want marriage and kids, you’ve been mostly single, or when you are in a relationship, you are constantly doubting it. You are looking for the perfect person, because you cannot bear the idea of choosing wrong. The core issue is not that you are too picky or it’s too late. It is that your nervous system is a hunted rabbit. You do not trust yourself, so it is impossible to trust anyone else.
- We played a game once where we say things we have never said to each other. I told you — I think you’ll either be extremely successful or in jail. You nod and do not ask any questions, like it is a given. Everyone sees how bright you are, but you are also morally ambiguous in a way that makes me uneasy.
- There is a hitch in your voice when empathy ends and fear begins. It sounds like a light switch flipped and after, the words that come out are all dark: I cannot see your heart in them anymore.
- I went to your wedding with a knot in my chest. Over the last two years, gatherings at your house often included everyone awkwardly watching shots of hostility and condescension fly back and forth between the two of you. There is so little grace, so much resentment. Your wedding was still beautiful. I saw a glimmer of the couple I knew once, swelling with hope and generosity. I pray you are able to find your way back there.
- The most striking thing about you is your insatiable need for connection. The connection must be a certain kind: intense, all-consuming. Over time you’ve realized nothing is enough for you, and so you are afraid to accept anything, especially from someone you are beginning to love, scared to hurt them with your constant desire for more. You feel everyone’s heartbeat so close to yours. But you do not seem to know how to hold your own heart, in your own hands, without giving it to someone you see as more capable, more steady. You do not see how you are the only person who can hold all of you.
- I don’t know how you fill your days when you haven’t worked in years. This would not be a question if it felt like you were deeply fulfilled, but it seems like most of your dissatisfaction stems from aimlessness. You are stuck in one long groundhog day. There is energy inside of you and no place to direct it, so it spills out sideways, and your thoughts feel like a riptide of ruminations. I’ve watched you become more brittle over time. So much could change if you saw yourself as worth tending to. You are strong enough to bear the staggering responsibility of committing to your own life.
- Your confidence moves oceans. You speak things into existence, and people are spellbound. It is unclear if they believe your ideas, or you. You are young enough that they are still the same thing. You are generous with what you share, electric in how you share. I am curious who you will become. It is clear that the world affects you deeply. I wonder if you will be able to hone what moves through you in great currents and allow it to transform you. Otherwise, I fear it might break you.
- The first thing I noticed was how warm you are. You have a propensity to laugh so hard it shocks us all into living. The second thing I noticed: you are the person everyone goes to for help. You tell me it is because you like being useful. But after knowing you for a while, I also see there is a limit to the closeness you allow. You find it easier to give than to receive. A part of you remains walled off, impenetrable. The relationships I’ve seen you in follow a similar pattern. Falling in love and the high that follows. Every partner delights in you. How can they not? You are generous, kind, joyful. But every single person is confronted with the wall eventually. They may try, for months or years, to sit with it, to push through it, but so far, I haven’t seen anyone succeed. Eventually, the relationship becomes too stagnant and you leave. And this repeats, over and over again. I hope someday, you meet someone who has the gentleness that allows every cell in your body to relax, relax and let in the love you have been scared to feel.
- When I look at you, I see no bottom, no ending. And maybe the ending will come eventually, but right now, we are falling in love. The sense of astonishment from being seen at such high granularity. I did not realize I could appear so clearly to someone, so much of me brought into your awareness. You see into me 10 layers deeper than anyone else I’ve loved. How your thoughts echo in some part of my brain most people’s voices don’t reach.