Clarity

on the power of understanding human contact

When they meet, it is dark, but not enough to see the stars. Streetlights are glaring. There is the intrigue of smoke in the air, puffs being released into the night. She stands there waiting with a carefully rolled cigarette between her fingers. Beyond the sound of laughter and floating of bodies, there is another woman standing alone.

“Hey,” she says, taking the steps she needs to draw in closer. “You have beautiful hair.”

The other woman smiles, but not without hesitation. There is nearly always a glimmer of distrust when encountering a stranger.

“Thank you,” she answers with the trace of an accent.

“Who are you here with?”

“Ah,” the woman laughs. “I’m waiting for a Tinder date, but she’s probably not gonna show.”

“Oh,” she laughs. “Never rely on an app.”

“Never rely on people, more like.”

“Hope is a dangerous game.”

They stand together, inhaling nicotine and watching people walk towards the Ha’Penny Bridge. There is a cadence in their silence. She reaches into her pocket, finds her phone, unlocks the screen, and holds it out.

“If you don’t mind,” she says. “I’m new here. I moved here from Canada. I think I’d like your number so we can become friends.”

“You’re so sweet,” she replies, taking the small device to input her new Irish digits. “Who are you here with? And may I join, if this turns out to be a total bust? Maybe it wasn’t meant to be ha.”

The Canadian student was meeting with a couple mates, one lass, one lad, for pints. “Sure! We’ll be upstairs at the bar, come find us,” and in she opens the door into a bright warm scene.

A river of curls with striking green eyes later, the woman outside stops feeling bored and feels like this bad idea of a date might actually have been alright. She receives a text just when she’s about to go up.

I’m downstairs with some friends.

Almost reluctantly, she finds the other side entrance to the ground floor and makes her way through the rock music blasting. Looking for the right face in a sea of foreign ones, she exhales.

She misses her once she’s gone, and she doesn’t really know how to explain that, except to appeal to Aristotle who said real friends are a single soul dwelling in one body. The trick is accepting the consequences that accompany sharing the same place.

Days pass.

They meet in a restaurant and learn how to adjust to each other’s gaze.

“You’re peculiar,” the woman says.

She laughs not because it is a joke but because she understands the value of not being someone who can be read all the time.

There we are, two women in a dim room, exchanging secrets for change.

“What would you shift if you could?”

“You’re asking what I would alter about destiny?”

The woman nods.

Her fingers are long, nails trimmed short. Dark hair booming. Brown eyes a looming presence.

“I guess,” she says. “I guess I’d want to say I’m sorry.”

“For what exactly?”

“Being a bitch?” She shrugs. “Not being there, not being capable of being there, finding solace in other places.”

“Can you describe what those other places are like?”

They are wires crossing, intersecting paths, configurating themselves in something that resembles friendship.

Weeks later, they’d laugh at the fact it took her so long to see the obvious carnal gay male paraphernalia filling every space around their idealistic conversations on feelings, relationships and heartbreaks.

“I never not look around, pardon my French, how could we miss that one giant dildo-candle on the wall there… Jesus!”

Their laughter echoed back to that first night in town. Downstairs, the pub was coming alive brighter, boisterous, interwoven youth of a couple generations of locals, students, expats, migrants and pints together.

She remembers the relief upstairs, after leaving her date with her friends, her partner, and her previous 5PM date she’d carried through to the next possible romantic encounter. One big happy orgy in the making for them, she hoped. She felt for the puzzled face of the woman’s afternoon date, still present, local, Irish and more monogamous than her. Local yet more lost than she was, it was all so free. Her first Irish exit, she later thought, after she hopped up to dim lights and more platonic conversations with a familiar stranger & mates.

The taste of bad smoke, better foam and that last text greeted her after she’d arrived home. A new friend, serendipity, smiles. So weird, but maybe the first good night out with no aftertaste of things badly said, unsaid, or lost in clumsy translation.

They kept meeting at the same table, back on the right side of the discreet café down Essex St West. Sister-peas from one karmic pod.

“It takes one to know one. You’re ‘peculiar’ too y’know?”

Some souls have walked so many lives and are still able to laugh with strangers and marvel at the little things. The owner—maybe an old antique collector—had managed to weave his phallic treasures in a romantic gothic interior design and somehow the overall scheme felt like home.

“You may have taken me to the gayest café in the city, thank you.”

She started asking about the kind of writing her new mate did.

“I write about love,” she replied. And started describing her first book, written right in the same quiet corner. “I mean, if I had to explain what it is about love that affects me, I’m not sure I’d be able to.”

“Human connection?”

“Perhaps,” she shrugs. “Maybe it’s all the books I read when I was young and my fascination with how people interact, especially when they’re preoccupied with thoughts of another.”

The woman looks at her and she smiles.

“Are you lonely?”

“I’m not sure,” she answers. “There’s a method in being alone. A freedom in being able to write and walk wherever I want and not feel the need to answer to anyone.”

The woman continues to look at her, not quite an examination, but there is a deep curiosity. Belonging, too.

Years pass. Each go their respective ways. The woman gets married. Palestine and Israel are at war again. The woman posts reels of a man cutting cucumbers over a steel bowl in a tent in Gaza. The wind makes everything move. AI is on the rise. The two women keep in touch. They recall Dublin. They reunite in Paris. They walk along cobblestones, grab groceries, spread a platter across a table in a living room.

“I can’t believe the cab driver did not believe we are sisters! Oh well.”

For once, the woman thinks, casual racism would be on my side but his logic was impeccable : “She speak English.” “You speak French.”

Hard to argue with a man convinced of anything, but for once she doesn’t need to be believed. Feeling is enough.

Amidst all of… everything, it’s nice to know in their hearts, that they are.

We are enough. Together or separate, sometimes together but not so much.

One of them recalls how it felt to be asked, “Do you ever miss the value of a human’s touch?”

She slips into her robotic suit. She glances at the man who’s pressing nodes with wires into her chest.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” He asks. “There’s still time to make a different choice.”

Her mind flutters. The cost of a butterfly’s wing is a tsunami in Japan. The price of a woman who is lonely and loves science is much higher.

“Take me away,” she says. So he does, but not before asking her a question.

“What do you think you’ll miss the most?”

“About being human?”

He nods.

“Is it protocol to ask?”

He laughs. “You really care about protocol?”

Her mind flutters again, recalls meeting the woman outside, how the air was drenched in cigarette smoke and perfume, how the woman asked, “How did it feel to know he doesn’t love you?”

It hurt, she thinks. But nothing will ever hurt me again.

“I’ll miss petrichor,” she says. “I’ll miss the sounds and smell of the earth without trying to explain them.”

He nods and everything goes quiet.

She wakes up without feeling.

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