wavelength

Most conversations require translation. Not language, exactly, but something adjacent to it: the constant, low-grade work of converting what I actually mean into something the person across from me can receive without static, adjusting the frequency of myself until it lands somewhere they can pick it up. I’ve done this so long I stopped noticing the effort, the way you stop noticing you’re holding your stomach in until someone asks why you look uncomfortable.

Then, occasionally, rarely, I meet someone who receives me at the frequency I’m already broadcasting, no adjustment required, and it disorients me every time. I’ll say something half-formed, some sentence I expect to have to explain twice, and they’ll already be nodding before I finish it, already three steps ahead in a thought I thought only I was thinking. There’s a physics term for this, two things vibrating at the same rate, resonating instead of interfering, and it is the closest word I have for what it feels like to be understood without translation.

I used to believe this kind of understanding was proof of something profound, soulmates or fate or whatever grand word felt appropriate for how rare it seemed. I don’t think that anymore. I think it’s closer to coincidence, two people who happen to have been shaped by similar pressures into similar frequencies, no more mystical than two tuning forks struck near enough to each other that one starts humming in response to the other. It doesn’t make it less remarkable. It just makes it less about destiny and more about the specific, unglamorous luck of standing close enough to someone when the note gets struck.

What I’ve had to accept is how rare this actually is, and how much of my life will be spent broadcasting at a frequency most people simply aren’t tuned to receive, not out of any failure on either side, just physics, just distance, just two different wavelengths existing in the same room without ever quite touching. I used to take that personally. Now I think it would be strange if it worked any other way. If everyone could receive everyone, the word for it wouldn’t mean anything.

So I keep translating, most days, for most people, because that’s what the room requires of me. And every so often, without warning, I meet someone who doesn’t need the translation at all, and for exactly as long as that lasts, I stop performing the effort of being understood and simply am, which might be the closest thing to peace I’ve found that doesn’t require me to be alone to get it.

-cj