The Quiet Arrival of Consequence

I reckon I am actually enjoying this.

I’m spending time with her, and the sky hasn’t fallen down yet, which frankly feels like a statistical error on God’s part. She is so quiet. So entirely, profoundly silent and composed. Her voice is pitched somewhere below a whisper, so low you practically have to lean into her physical orbit just to catch the syllables before they evaporate. I find myself holding my breath so I don’t drown her out.

She’s a lovely girl. Very respectful, speaks so soft—Lord, I’m repeating myself like a broken phonograph. But it’s the truth, and the truth usually bears repeating when you can’t quite believe it.

She speaks with this maddeningly calm, entirely matured rhythm. We argue, or rather, I launch into feverish, spinning dialectics, and she just sits there, listening. I can feel the pure, unvarnished innocence in the monumental fallacies she constructs. But here is the kicker, the thing that absolutely short-circuits my brain: she actually listens. When the logic traps her, she doesn’t dig in her heels or scream. She just nods, quietly examines the wreckage of her argument, and tries to fix it. Who does that? What kind of creature operates without an ego the size of a cathedral?

God knows why—perhaps just to throw some noise into that terrifying quiet—but I found myself lecturing. Full-blown, breathless rants sitting on the edge of the bed. Lacan’s mirror stage, Deleuze and the rhizome, the heat-death of the universe, biological evolution, why the Big Bang is just a cosmic joke without a punchline. Just absolute, pretentious drivel pouring out of me like I was trying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom. And she just watched me. Like I was some peculiar science exhibit she had paid a nickel to see.

It felt entirely ridiculous, and I loved every second of it.

Oh, by the way. Just a small bookkeeping note on the grand ledger of my pathetic existence: I am no longer a virgin.

Just like that. Twenty-nine years of agonizing, neurotic buildup, a lifetime of treating it like the Holy Grail guarded by a dragon, and it turns out it was just a Tuesday, or maybe a Wednesday, I can’t even remember. All that suffering for a footnote.

I suppose the joke’s entirely on me.