[3/4]
This irony ran through the entire rest of their conversation, which lasted a couple of hours. As Ty stuffed the pillowcases and shook out the blanket, Seonaidh laughed with relief about how much she hated primary school, how the people there worked daily to make her feel wrong and out of place. Ty asked if she knew anyone from home she could talk to about her worries, she might as well have shook her head and announced defeat as an answer. The duvet kicked up, and softly floated down on the bed where Ty and Seonaidh popped it over the bed corners. They sat on the floor, Seonaidh leaning against the same post that Ty was poking and prodding through his socks years later as he stared at the ceiling. Seonaidh cursed her old friends, how she was nervous to talk about anything personal around them, how they were too immature and Seonaidh had outgrown them. Ty heard all this and considered it a sign of trust in him. He responded in kind, talking about friends of Rian making him the butt of their jokes, trying to shut down Ty to seem cool. If Ty was savvier and not so enamoured, he would have noted how tenuous many of his friendships were, how much he had filled that lack of trustfulness into a persecution complex rather than fixing it, and how enthusiastic Seonaidh was about leaving behind her old friends once she got the chance. With the simplifying benefits of hindsight, the flaw of having a moment of bonding predicated on airing your problems with other friends seems incredibly clear-cut. But this would not manifest for another few years. As the conversation ended and he climbed into bed, the little sigh Ty made mirrored the one he would make several years later after realising his friendship with Seonaidh had ended. A flat breath of air, easing the chest but clarifying nothing, it was the weary way he'd accept another morning for a significant time, including long before she left. This, too, didn't occur to him until after things it had gotten far too serious to be easily fixed.
There are a few philosophical concepts Ty had to help him understand this experience, ones which he could only hazily remember and so his memory had mashed parts of them together to suit his current needs. Ty liked to call it 'deconstruction', though the name was already taken by one of the philosophers Ty was butchering. One key aspect of Ty's(?) theory that is relevant to our narrative is an individualist approach to language and communication, and the implications it brings for human relationships of all kinds. Put simply, the old way of considering language is to believe that each word directly corresponds to a single idea. When we say “tree”, for example, we are identifying the concept 'tree' and using the word it corresponds to, with no other complications. In this theory, language and thought are linked directly, to the point of being different forms of the same thing.
In recent decades, however (as far as Ty remembers), a counter-theory has emerged: primarily a literary theory, it instead proposes that words are symbols that carry a whole nest of ideas with them. Under this theory, when you think of the word 'tree', you will think of their colour, images of the different kinds of leaves they have will come to mind, you will probably start to think about trees you have encountered throughout your life, especially the ones from your childhood or that are otherwise significant to you. This may lead you to think of trees in metaphorical terms; the tree of Life, the changing seasons as associated with ageing, the pattern of your own life... 'tree' is not a single idea, it is a web of associations we have built up throughout our life. Thus, when we use the word 'tree', it triggers an explosion of senses, images, smells, colours, ideas and associations, from all the interactions we have accumulated over time that link to the word.
As delightful an idea this is, and we should appreciate the colourful and vibrant flowing character it gives to language and art, it also raises several troublesome implications for how we talk to people. Since words are informed by experience, and no two people's life experiences are the same (unless they are the exact same person, this is impossible), then a word will mean something different for every person who uses it, especially with those words assigning more general, universal concepts. If this difference of experience can influence how we understand a word like 'tree', imagine what happens when you apply to more loaded words, like 'love', 'identity', 'past', the name of someone you've known a long time, etc. When we talk with someone, be they a lifelong friend, partner, or casual acquaintance, we are not communicating directly. This is not an intimate communication where two minds each take their ideas, passions, worries and visions and bring them to another person, thereby validating those feelings and sharing wonder. Speech, rather, is a simultaneous translation, where ideas are converted (roughly) into words and then translated back (roughly) into similar but not identical ideas. Even when we're speaking the same language, all communication requires interpretation.
So when someone says “Everything is getting to me,” even a measured, professional diagnosis cannot convert these words back to the original subjective experience being described. When someone says “I don't really fit in here anymore,” as Seonaidh did, the true implication here could never be certain, only guessed at. Likewise, in the year-long fallout after Seonaidh ghosted Ty and all their mutuals, he found it hard to talk about. He went a month without mentioning it to anyone, hoping that this was just a misunderstanding between himself and Seonaidh and which she would explain and resolve once she got back to him, until eventually it was brought up at Sarah's house. Then he finally spilled, giving a garbled and rambling account of her disappearance, but even then it felt incomplete. Some spare details emerged, like Seonaidh's relative distance from her other friends, but even those were minor suspicions only made notable in retrospect. In truth, Ty is lying in bed in the early afternoon over a year on, nursing new problems, and yet his mind still returns to Seonaidh, with no answers and no new insights. In that time he had made new friends, found solidarity with old ones and moved on with his life. But his mind had not escaped the pull of this mystery, and it was a mystery he ultimately felt alone in. Because of the deconstruction problem, he still found it difficult to get across exactly how it had affected him, in part because it was founded on a relationship he once thought two-way and direct.
With the awareness that Seonaidh and him were actually not at all on the same page, it began a process of re-evaluating their entire friendship. Every scene is subject to revision, every personal moment devolves into tangents that try to lend context to her movement, yet they still come up incomplete in gaining a full understanding. Having given up on understanding the full breadth of their relationship, Ty instead spent the following year polishing vignettes, endlessly replaying their friendship's formative moments like a rapidly degrading film projection, especially in moments where his relationship with other friends became strained.
This is where the deconstruction problem and the theories about living in the moment (introduced earlier) come together-
The phone rang. Ty was jolted up, scrambled half out of bed and grabbed his phone from the bedside table, landing with his calves high up on the mattress as he relieved the pressure from his arm and lowered his torso onto the floor.
“Yes... mmhello?”
It was Rían. “Oh hey Ty. Have you checked your messages?”
“What?” Ty asked, though he assumed Rían was asking where Ty was, and was he coming to Sarah's at all.
“I'm at Sarah's now, where are you? Are you coming at all?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. I don't know if-”
Ty heard Rían sigh.
“-I don't know if I'll make it, sorry.”
There was a pause. After the sharp trill of the phone buzzing had jolted and alerted him, the adrenaline was already gone and Ty could feel the dread and fatigue overtake him. He already had trouble keeping up with friends, and depression wasn't helping. He settled with his head and back resting on the floor while his legs slung on top of the bed, and each new sentence from Rían that dragged him back into speech made him lurch.
“Next time just say you're not interested. I'm sick of inviting you to things and trying to keep up with you and getting nothing back.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“If you're sorry you'll do something about it. Every time it's like, how much longer is this gonna be going on? And it's not like this is your fault, but it's been this way for months, maybe you should be talking to someone.”
“What, like you?” Ty bit his tongue.
“Yes, like me! Fucking asshole, I'm trying to help. Dunno why I bother.”
“...see you.”
Rían sighed again. “Yeah, see you soon hopefully.” He hung up.
Ty uhm'd and ah'd about going, then mulled on his relationship with Rían for a while before returning to the train of thought which previously had him occupied.
These two theories, firstly of life being lived not in the present but in a constant evaluation and re-evaluation of the past and assumed future, and secondly the deconstruction problem in which all communication is an imperfect work of simultaneous translation which leaves us always uncertain of what each other mean when we communicate| – in confluence, Ty found an interesting mindset which described his past few months' thought processes in relation to Seonaidh very well. Ty did not 'live in the moment', in fact he was often sidetracked by irrelevant curiosity. In the wake of Seonaidh's ghosting, this had accelerated. Again, he adorned over the memories of their friendship, or disastrously considered the potential future of what he would say if reunited with her by circumstance (these were often pure fancy, as we'll be seeing later). But, because of the current state of their non-friendship, the emotional clarity and certainty we often assign to such memories had been replaced with a constant shifting palette of new meanings and contextual code. Happy memories sometimes came tinged with loss, not on their own merits but in consideration of how things ended. Features of Seonaidh's personality gained new attention and were sometimes lent an ironic tinge in retrospect. Many of these re-evaluations were done almost unconsciously, many based on however Ty felt that day.
However, despite how often Ty's mood would change, they seemed to gain a certain sharpness in melancholy, when even a mundane sketch of his life story became proof of an anti-Ty conspiracy concocted by the universe. He would lace into their otherwise normal friendship the threads of some great tragedy, finding clues everywhere in their story that pointed towards its downfall, but he knew this wasn't really true either. Or rather, he corrected, it seemed incredibly unlikely, since he had developed a suspicion of certainty and absolute truth/untruth ever since she disappeared. It did not feel like Ty was living through the aftermath of some strange past event. Rather, it was like that simultaneous translation process - this time with the second person having made themselves absent, leaving Ty to reassemble their initial imperfect translation from an even more fallible memory. After a month it exhausted even him.
The future did not exist. Occasionally he would build some imagined reconciliation with parts assembled from misremembered films, and it usually goes like this:
