On Bubbles and Awkward Silence

I don’t even remember her name, but absolutely remember the conversation we had.

Pulsating dance music. Expensive drinks. Attractive people everywhere under the warm red light of an underground dance club. And yet it was that conversation that sticks with me.

I had just arrived from the airport to see an old high school friend. Even if I was surprised to see him with a blonde and a brunette, it was good to see him.

I didn’t get to talk much to the blonde. It became apparent my friend was going to be more than just friends with her by the end of the night. This left her friend, the brunette, and I to determine how we were going to pass the time.

She and I talked for a bit about the usual things strangers talk about. Where are we from, what do we do, how we like living where we are…very boring.

In a new city, a new neighborhood with nowhere to go and no one to see, it was just us…stranded under the music and red lights as attractive people danced and our mutual friends entangled themselves together somewhere else in the bar. She and I were trapped in a bubble, invisible to the whole world around us.

One can experience awkward silence in a loud, underground dance club.

After I was annoyed and had enough, I offered to buy her a drink to get some space. Sure, she said.

I walk through the throbbing crowd of people actually having a good time. As I linger at the bar a little longer than usual, I wonder what my girlfriend is up to, and wonder what she would do in my shoes right now.

Back at our table, I put our drinks down and she and I discuss what we are drinking, if they are nice drinks, how expensive they are, and how expensive the city is. Back to the same, boring bubble.

One can be fed up with awkward silence, even in a loud, underground dance club.

I sip my negroni, look over at the stranger brunette next to me and asked her, “what are we not talking about that we really should be talking about?”

It turns out there was a technicolor tapestry of dreams, ambitions, and questions that had been grayed over by the life she had built. Despite a successful nine-to-five and a career we all want, her main concerns were her faith. Success and good works were fine, but how to reconcile with earning her daily bread and so much more on top of it. How, in a city like this, could she maintain faith in God surrounded by people people (waving her hand at the club) like this? She wasn’t better than them as much as just in tune with the contradictions of faith and her environment.

She felt she had to be someone she wasn’t, convey and defend opinions she did not support, and shield what made her unique.

“What difference am I going to make on things that deep down really matter to me,” she laments amid the transient revelers.

In these moments, our boring little bubble became a safe place for her to be more than just a random brunette, but a person with complexity and depth the world wasn’t seeing.

One can share comfortable silence in a loud, underground dance club. We were not friends, but we were not strangers anymore.

While I could not provide any answers, what I could provide was that bubble of initially awkward silence that muted a loud dance floor. She asked if she could share her number one priority without judgment. It cost me little to do. In a world full of retorts and judgments and snark, our bubble provided that moment of “yeah, I get why that’s important to you” without my own ego or opinion in it. Muting a dance floor is one thing, but muting deeper feelings of judgment or pretense, real or imagined, is a whole other offering.

Soon after, my high school friend came back. She and I hugged, expressed how much we enjoyed the conversation, and parted ways. I never saw her again.

I think about this exchange from time to time, and the question “what are we not talking about that we should really be talking about?” More often than not, we cover the safe topics, the worn path of communication. When people ask how we feel, we offer up a half hearted “doing well” or “can’t complain.”

Looking back now, it’s funny how fleeting this conversation was and yet it gives me hope. It doesn’t take a lot to connect with people on a deeper level, fleeting or not. Substantive conversations can’t solve all of our problems, but the memory of this chance meeting makes me think it could be a good place to start.