I Want to Know You
Recently I read Adrienne Rich’s remarkable 1977 essay "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.“ At one point, she writes:
We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: "In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville.” You tell me: “She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends.” You tell me: “It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining.” Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning’s weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green women - of threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.
It reminded me of what it is to really want to know someone. The way, as Rich writes, knowing someone can meaningfully expand our universe. I remembered how learning even simple, mundane things about the last woman I loved–her father’s name, a bad movie she’d seen at the theater in her early teens, things like that–felt exciting and nourishing to me. They became part of my universe, which became larger as it expanded to accommodate them. I wanted the entire expansive overgrown solitude of my mind to be rejuvenated and made into something new by learning about her. New monuments and statue gardens. I wanted a kind of intimacy with her where knowing how she saw the world might inform how I saw the world.
Now I feel so solitary, I feel the damage this prolonged loneliness is doing, and I can feel those tendrils in my mind, the ones Rich mentions, withering, drying up, needing to come across someone who ignites their interest again, someone I want to know, and who wants to know and be known by me in return. Elsewhere in the essay, Rich writes, “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of
people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in
life.” But we can’t have that alchemy with just anyone. That’s why Rich calls it alchemy.
To find someone is hard enough. Someone with whom you can “both know we are trying, all the time, to extend
the possibilities of truth between us.
The possibility of life between us.” Without the other, there is no possibility of life.

Secretary (2002)
Notes
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