What the Philosopher Taught Me

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Wild day.

I was walking back from a nature reserve close by my house today around sunset. It had been gorgeous and sunny, and I was returning from maybe two hours up there soaking up the serenity and reflection before it gets too cold.

A lady even asked me while I was up there, “are you okay?” I laughed, explaining I was fine, and she returned my merriment by explaining to herself, “you’re just meditating!” I was elated by her sweetness, to hear another person’s voice not through an app. It’s been a weird year.

I’d just passed back into the neighborhood abutting the mountain park, with headphones in my ears playing piano music, when a man who appeared to be homeless and under the influence of some very serious drug combination or maybe severely mentally disabled started chasing me. I was oblivious, apparently he’d been screaming and I’d just not heard, passing next to this woman’s house, when she motioned to point him out.

At the precise moment I turned around to look, he had just stopped to spin around and flail his arms, so I didn’t really know what to think when she said said he’d chased her too. I tried to calculate if I could lose him for a moment and then looked back at her. She was looking at him and then she suddenly told me to rush into her garage because he was running again so she could close the door.

I looked again and he was trotting in my direction. When he registered that I was looking at him he sped up. He was maybe 20 feet away and strong-looking, tall, maybe 230 lbs. I was a couple blocks from home or so and he was saying something incoherent as he stared me down.

I recognized her from when she passed me in the park a few minutes prior. She’d smiled at me really warmly so I thought she was probably friendly, but the lizard brain part of me was overloaded with fear thinking it was some trap.

I slowly shuffled into her garage while she closed şişli escort the door, and stayed close by the door. I came up with a plan for how I’d pull the handle, lift the door, and make a run for it screaming, maybe snaking into places some very disoriented person couldn’t go, and expecting to be tackled in the street. Only if anything freaky happened there in her garage, I thought. She looked at me like I may be a little dumb.

She seemed visibly shaken and was talking about calling the police to a couple others standing in the doorway. That maybe should’ve been enough information, but when I saw that one of the people she was talking to was a muscular, college-aged guy who was apparently her son, it just wouldn’t process for me that it all wasn’t some vividly convincing plan to harm me.

I was standing there motionless and almost silent, feigning more fear than I was feeling and trying to respond to her normally while I emotionally prepared to be dragged somewhere and disrobed. After considering the merits of going deadweight and how little I wanted to deal with any police officers that evening for a few seconds I said, “well you can call the police if you want, but I don’t mind just hanging out right here for maybe 20 or 30-”

I was about to say “minutes”, I guess I was really scared of the disheveled man seeing me again, but she finished my sentence “seconds? Yeah, we’ll do that.”

At that moment I knew she didn’t want me in her house any more than I wanted to be in there, so I relaxed enough to figure out with her a way to get me home without having to help the hapless man get taken off presumably to jail or suffer any of his brutality.

I’m beyond grateful for her generosity. Now I’m trying to figure out how to thank someone you know nothing about for plausibly saving your life. I don’t desire for it to be so automatic for me to distrust obviously good people and be constantly coming up with strategies based on paranoia, and I’m not sure how much I like those things about myself.

There’s guilt for the egotism inherent in me thinking that something in this small anecdote is telling- about maybe me, maybe us. I’ve been a bit of a calloused old bitch for awhile now, no one who knows me in real life ever quite denied that. Then again, I’m not long out of my 20s and that’s the third time some stranger has followed me in such a menacing way, the second time one was clearly on drugs, and the other time that guy refused to go his own separate way until I got out my totally battery-drained phone and pretended to be dialing.

It’s not like I’m from some gang-ridden place. I live in a big city, but moved to my neighborhood for the schools. I’ve lived enough places to know that awful stuff happens in tiny remote towns and the most expensive parts of cities and everything in between. I know drugs do a lot to make someone a menace to society, and that seems like reason maybe to make them illegal, but what should be more wrong is whatever makes people want to terrorize all the women around them like that when they’re on drugs, and whatever allows people to lie to themselves about how much drugs can bring out the worst in people.

Doing whatever makes people feel like they’re disposable and worthless is what causes both of those behaviors I think, but it’s not always clear when you’ve done that to someone. People can seem unassailably resilient and aloof when they’re not, and if you’re too petrified to even act hysterical you’re more likely not to spot anyone’s real state of mind.

Even if someone could tell you how fragile their feelings were in your hands and how much you crushed them, what’s the solution? Does anyone know what to properly do with that kind of information when they know they more or less made perfectly justifiable actions? If you’re almost certain you did something wrong to someone you never wanted to mistreat, the words of the most heartfelt apology you know how to say or feel still aren’t enough.

I could go on and on about all the things I learned from my game with the handsome philosopher who so expertly performed his part as he led me into my own most cherished fantasy adventure blindly. If I did, it would have to be a somehow not-awkward book that went on about porn, art, consent, lust, romance, self-acceptance, fate, the truth I can’t emphasize enough that people do themselves favors when they don’t cower into shallow truths when asked difficult questions, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.

As valuable as those lessons all were to learn, I can’t seem to put myself to the task of telling all that, because things like what happened today fly past me so often. Sometimes I’m successfully shot and I can’t write much that’s coherent while I’m trying to mend.

It’s felt odd to miss someone I never knew much, but I’ve been so much under fire since I last arranged for one of his lessons that there’s been no more benefit that old character has been able to promise me. It’s where philosophy ends and psychology begins that I’m left feeling so unsettled about my bygone partner and all of my mind games.

There’s not much sexual arousal or romantic fixation toward him anymore, and I credit writing that story and getting out most of my favorite memories of him. When my thoughts linger on him now, they’re through the gaze of not knowing what on earth our society and community are supposed to be in hypothetical theory. It feels like if I knew that better, I wouldn’t feel so sad at that snapshot of events between me, that man, and that woman today.

So for me, the thing the philosopher taught maybe more than anything was how much life leaves you curious about some new bizarre story you could tell about a cleric. Who knows, maybe I should figure out the difference between play and life first though.

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