Magic Spells

“Don’t worry, dear Pamela. I’ll do my scientific best to command your fleet.”

Let’s talk.

What we have here is, perhaps, a complex spatial relations issue. Consider the position of each. Consider the duration of each position of each. Consider the relative distance between any two points as a function of that duration. Let us narrow our focus to those sets that include two or more points sustaining a relatable distance from one another for a period of, say, a year. Five years. Ten years.

My question is: what is it that determines the continuity of these relationships?

I’ve never been able to figure this out. There were people with whom I had a deep and legitimate intimacy. This is not code for sex; I’m trying to be truthful. There were people with whom I exchanged revealing detail and sang and screamed and grew. Made things and went places and shared formative experiences. Mostly, we parted ways.

Sure, sometimes there are simple reasons. Someone moves away. Someone else becomes a dick. I become a dick. Other times, though, it’s hard to remember what precisely caused those two points to separate. There is always a story you could relate if called upon to do so, but that’s just the nature of narrative. If you examine such explanations carefully and honestly you’ll find that they usually wither. Like any story you relate in order to make sense of yourself and your past it is reductive, perspectival, and, in some sense, comforting.

For a long time I pinned this all on Quality. That there was some system of evaluation at work, sorting people into piles. This is not true. At other times, I would imagine that there was some emotional threshold beyond which a real connection was established. Again, not true. There are just too many counterexamples – people who had real worth and with whom I formed real bonds and these people are gone.

It is also not the case that this is a matter of insufficient attention. There were relationships I hated to lose, struggled to resuscitate, that failed all the same. There were relationships I just no longer cared about where the other participant tried and tried to no avail. At this point, the easy answer is that people develop and change and sometimes grow apart. I don’t believe that. I’ve walked away from others after experiencing no particular change. I’ve been walked away from similarly. There is something much more subtle happening, some kind of incongruity between a thing and our internal model of that thing. Fantasy, I guess.

A lie, basically.

All this said, the issue has only been deferred. There is some mysterious factor, be it an attribute or a relationship between attributes, that allows the normally fluid system of social interaction to change state. I’m talking in circles and have no particular insight to offer.

I choose to classify this as Navigation.

With my charts, sextant, and astrolabe, I must relocate this vessel from berth to berth. The process is then begun again. The Great Sea is filled with traces of our passage. Each voyage has been carefully recorded, and viewed together describe a pattern so intricate and so beautiful that you will recognize it truly. It will touch you in a way that you have never been touched and likely never will be again.