It has nothing to do with intelligence. No one really tells you that.
Smart people are everywhere. Smart people live within their own intelligence to tell you what is and what was and what will be.
Smart people bore me to tears.
That's not to say that I'm stupid. I know I am not. But that's not what this is, that's not what we're doing and it's not what I'm looking at.
I look for the shape. The gravity of a thought before it's released. The particular way a sentence is formed. The windows within an inner world and if they face my own.
Most people experience attraction as a current — something that runs along the surface and sparks on contact.
Physical. Immediate. I am not unaware of this. I've experienced it myself on some occasions. Spark is spark. Attraction is important. I won't argue it isn't.
To most.
Because I'm not broken and I'm not cold and I'm not waiting to be fixed by the right hands.
I'm just... elsewhere, first.
I'm in the way you build a sentence. In the pause before a question you haven't thought to ask yet. In the walls and the foundation and the framework of what makes you who you are. In the machine that pumps you out, and in the oil that lubricates you. In the rooms you've sealed. Watching the window you leave cracked open even in the winter because something in you still needs the air.
It's not like falling. Falling is easy. It takes little awareness.
It's recognition. Like walking into a house and knowing exactly where the kitchen is.
And it is very rare.
You can go years in a desert of pleasant conversation and compatible schedules and people who are good, genuinely good, who you feel nothing particular toward and you start to wonder if the problem is you.
Is it your fault for building a standard too high for anyone to reach?
Have you built your want around something that simply does not exist outside of your own head?
Have you confused depth with demand?
And then one day, someone comes along and says something — offhand, half a sentence, maybe not even trying — and the room will shift.
And you think: oh. There you are.
The cruelest thing about it is that once you've built a noetiscape with someone, it doesn't come down cleanly.
It's a co-creation. A private country. A shared grammar. Inside jokes that are really just shorthand for entire philosophies developed together over hours long conversations started over something stupid. References that might not translate to another single soul alive. A way of seeing the world that has their fingerprints all over it now, and yours all over theirs, and you can't always tell anymore which thoughts were originally whose.
And when it ends — if it ends — you don't just lose a person.
You lose an entire language.
You find yourself mid-sentence, about to say something in the shorthand, and there's no one there who speaks it. You have to translate yourself back into a tongue that feels foreign now. Common and imprecise. Missing all the words and sounds and feelings and meaning you'd invented for the things that mattered.
I've found it. I've lost it. I'm still looking. These are not three separate stories.
What I want, when I want someone, is this:
I want to build something in the space between us. The space around us. Above us. Below us. That runs through us. Not with a relationship or situationship as the infrastructure. Something primitive, before that, something of you that grows into my space without me even being aware of it. And I with yours. Where the light comes into this scape at an angle that only exists here, in this conversation, in the way our two minds happened to meet on a Tuesday when neither of us was actively trying.
I want to know the shape of your mental oasis.
I want you to know mine.
I want you to make space for me in your thinking the way I'll make space for you in mine.
I want to build a world with you that exists nowhere else.
That's not too much to ask. It's just very specific. It's very rare.
And worth every year of the desert in between.