I Had a Whole Script

I'm not going to name the person. That's not what this is about. What this is about is the specific, humbling experience of having a conversation go completely differently than every version you rehearsed in your head, and then standing there holding the aftermath like a bag you forgot you were carrying.

I had run it probably forty times. Not obsessively, or, okay, maybe a little obsessively, but it was always in the background, the way you do the dishes and also mentally deliver a very articulate sentence about something you actually want to say to someone. I knew the opening. I knew the pivot. I had a follow-up ready in case the first thing landed sideways. I had, objectively, prepared.

And then it happened. The actual moment. And I said, I want to be precise here, I said 'cool' and then I walked away. Not as a choice. As a reflex. Cool. Past tense. Gone. I was three steps down the sidewalk before I registered what had just occurred.

the replay face

I came home and made tea and sat on the counter for a while. Gerald was doing his thing on the windowsill. The collapsed bowl was just sitting there being a collapsed bowl. Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be, which made my particular failure feel even more absurd by contrast. Nobody's going to write a song about saying 'cool' and leaving. And yet. Here I am, November, twenty-three years old, still capable of completely dismantling my own preparation in real time.

cool. i said cool. and then i left.

The thing about the rehearsed version is it never has the other person in it. Not really. It has a shape where they're standing, a pause where they would respond, but the actual person, the actual unpredictable reality of them, isn't there. And then they show up and the whole structure just collapses, like, yes, like a pottery bowl on a windowsill. Cool. I said cool.