I heard a really good song in a vintage shop in Santa Cruz. Without thinking, I opened Shazam. A few seconds later, I knew it was “Fall in Love” by a band called Phantogram.
So easy. Then it occurred to me: if Shazam hadn’t existed, wouldn’t I have asked the person working there?
What’s this song?
They might have recommended something similar. I might have complimented their taste in music, and maybe we would have become friends. Or they might have just told me the title. I might have been too shy to ask and walked out. Maybe I’m making an encounter that never happened sound more beautiful than it would have been.
Still, I wondered. Now that answers come so easily, how many people have I stopped talking to?
I like wandering around alone. Even somewhere unfamiliar, I’d rather walk around as if I lived there than feel like a tourist. That doesn’t mean I’m good at doing everything on my own. Without my phone, I probably wouldn’t get around so easily. It gives me directions, tells me when the train comes, translates when I can’t make myself understood. I think of myself as traveling alone, but I’m relying on quite a lot.
It just seems that less and less of what I rely on is another person.
When I don’t know something, I look at a screen before I look at the person beside me. I don’t have to ask, wait, or work out what someone means. I don’t have to worry about bothering them. No awkwardness. I make very good use of all this convenience. And then I wonder why I have so few chances to really get to know people.
A little contradictory.
Instagram is like that too. I like Instagram. I like choosing photographs, collecting moments that mattered, making a little space of my own. A photo feels different once I’ve picked it out and posted it. It makes me feel a little clearer about what I like. And it feels good when someone notices.
But sometimes I can’t tell whether I’m keeping something because I like it or because I want to keep showing people that this is who I am. At first, the space reflected my taste. Later, I sometimes feel I have to live as the person who belongs in that space. I become self-conscious about something I made myself.
Something similar happens with relationships. It’s so easy to keep up with people I’m not particularly close to. Someone I met briefly. Someone I no longer have much reason to contact. Someone whose life, honestly, I’m not that curious about. It’s not that I dislike them. People who might simply have passed through my life stay in front of me.
After looking at so many people’s updates, sometimes I don’t have much energy left to reach out to someone I actually love. I’ve been looking at people all day, but it doesn’t feel as though I’ve spent time with anyone.
I thought I was someone who found meaning in close relationships. But how much patience did I actually have for the process of becoming close?
When I was in Georgia, I spent a lot of time with my uncle. Unlike my aunt, who loves meeting people, he’s quiet. Since retiring, he gets up at five every morning, goes to Mass, walks the dog, cooks, cleans. I thought he was a bit like a priest.
I’m fairly outgoing when I’m out, but I get quiet around my family. Partly because my aunt and a few of my cousins have such strong personalities that my energy gets drowned out. But that’s not all of it. At home, I just want to be quiet. I don’t like making an effort to fill every silence, and I’m not especially pleased when someone starts asking me a lot of questions.
Can’t we just ride in silence…?
Then I think: why do I assume being quiet is the better way? Maybe my aunt enjoys the talking itself. Maybe there doesn’t have to be a particular reason to say something.
What are two people like that supposed to do when they have to spend two hours in a car together?
My uncle has been doing it for more than thirty years. I’d wondered about it since I was little. How had someone so quiet ended up marrying my aunt?
One day, while we were spending time together, I asked. Why her?
He said it had been love at first sight, back in Korea. He also said she’d been wearing quite a lot of makeup, and he was surprised by how different she looked when she took it off. Then he pointed out that she didn’t drink, do drugs, or spend money carelessly. No tattoos, either.
Not quite the answer I’d expected.
He said he used to clean her apartment in Korea. He likes tidying and putting things in order; she’s the opposite. When he was younger, he sometimes found that frustrating. These days, they adjust to each other.
“Marriage can’t be perfect, and I’m not perfect either, so expecting perfection would be asking too much.”
Oh, so you complement each other.
He laughed for a while when I said that. I suppose you could see it that way, he said.
Then he said that plenty of people feel disappointed once the early excitement wears off, but my aunt had stayed beside him all these years. You trust that, and keep adjusting to each other.
I kept trying to explain why they worked together. Was it because their opposite personalities complemented each other? Did one being quiet and the other outgoing create a balance? But he didn’t give me that kind of neat explanation. There had been frustrating times. They were still different. They had been together all this time, and they would go on figuring out how to live together.
Maybe I’d been expecting perfection.
As a kid, my nickname was kkachiri. The prickly one. Looking back, I had very high standards of my own. If I didn’t like something, I wouldn’t do it. If it didn’t meet my expectations, I got upset. I disliked things that were vague, boundaries that weren’t clear. Either I liked something or I didn’t. Staying in between for too long made me restless.
But people don’t sort themselves out that neatly. Sometimes someone I love annoys me. I think I understand them, then realize I don’t at all. I want company, then I want to be alone. I’m like that myself.
There’s plenty I don’t like about myself. I still haven’t stopped crossing my legs. I still put on a video while I eat. I keep doing things I’ve told myself I don’t want to do. Yet I don’t give up on myself every time. Why was I so quick to hold someone else to a standard?
It’s not as if my actual life matched my ideals. Or as if I was making some extraordinary effort to get there. Maybe I was just carrying on being the prickly one.
Of course, I don’t mean every relationship has to be endured. There are people I don’t fit with, and relationships it’s right to leave. I’ve made those choices too. But I wonder whether I’ve sometimes decided too quickly just because I felt uncomfortable. Whether I judged how understandable someone was before taking the time to understand them.
It took a few seconds to find the song in the vintage shop. I think I wanted to figure people out that quickly too. Whether we fit. What kind of person they were. Whether it was okay to get close. I wanted to skip the uncertain part.
But most of the relationships I love didn’t begin that way. I think about my friends from elementary school. Even when we didn’t like each other, we had to keep seeing each other in class. We’d fight, then meet again the next day. Through all that mess, we gradually learned: oh, that’s what this person is like. Having so little choice probably felt frustrating then. Looking back, I think it taught me something about living with other people.
Now I have far more choices. Where to be, whom to meet, whom to stop talking to. Last year, I wanted so badly to be free. When freedom finally arrived, I was confused. I didn’t know what to do with it.
I want to try making slightly different choices now. Ones that leave a little room for awkwardness, without rushing to fix it. For differences I don’t have to judge immediately.
I think I can afford to be a little more generous.
I want to be someone who welcomes people. At least the people I already love—I want them to feel welcome when they see me. Even if they talk too much. Even if they think things I don’t quite understand. I’m probably not about to become as talkative as my aunt. But perhaps I can remember that she might want to talk just as much as I want to be quiet.
The world is already so confusing. Wouldn’t it be a comfort if even one person welcomed you without leaving you guessing? If they could make room for your imperfections?
The next time I hear a good song, I’ll probably open Shazam again. It’s a habit by now. Still, after I find out the title, I could say something to the person working there.