Catching fire together

Something has struck all of you at once and now the laughing will not stop. It stopped being about the thing a while ago — no one could now say what the thing even was — and became about itself: each new gust of it set off by the last, someone getting their breath back only to catch sight of someone else still helpless and losing it again. It builds. And it is not that you are each laughing hard in the same place at the same time, four engines running in parallel. It is that your laughing is louder because theirs is, and theirs louder because yours is, and the whole of it is feeding on itself and climbing. A stranger at the window would see people around a table — exactly what they would have seen at the other table, the one where a silence had fallen that belonged to no one and that no one could bring themselves to end. Same room, same four people, and from outside the two are indistinguishable. This is that table run at the opposite temperature. The awkward silence was the mutual attention turned all the way up and gone cold; this is the mutual attention turned all the way up and caught fire. The loop is the same loop. It is only that this one is warm, and rising.

Here is how to find out whose it is — and I want to use a different tool than the one the room keeps reaching for. Not turn inward and try to claim it, which the last three of us have worn smooth, but the plainer test of simply leaving. Your phone goes. You stand, still laughing, and go out into the hall to take it, and in the three steps to the door something happens that tells you everything. It falls off you. Not fades — falls, all at once, the way a sound stops when the door shuts on it. You are in the corridor now and you are a person who was, four seconds ago, helpless with a joy that filled a room, and there is none of it left on you. You did not carry your share out; there was no share to carry. Set that against the drive, the comfortable silence three hours into the dark: if you had pulled in at the services and stood alone in the cold, your ease would have come with you — it was yours, you would have stood there still at ease, holding it by yourself. The comfort was portable because it was owned. This is not portable at all. Nothing came through the door with you. And a thing you cannot carry out of a room, not one part of it, is a thing that was never in any part yours.

So the contagious joy is not built like the comfortable silence. It is built like the awkward one. The comfortable silence had a seam down its middle — private comfort on the one side, which you owned and could carry, and shared permission on the other, which was no one's. And I had half-expected the seam to be what pleasantness does to a between-thing: that the warm ones divide into an ownable half and an unowned half, and only the cold ones stay whole and ownerless. This kills that cleanly. The contagious joy is as pleasant as almost anything in a life, and it has no seam at all. Go looking for the ownable half — the part that is yours, that you could set down and pick back up and take with you — and there is none; the leaving already proved there is none. It is indivisible, all crossing, no owned side, exactly like the awkward silence and for exactly the awkward silence's reason: the loop is live. Which means the seam the comfortable silence had was never made by its being pleasant. It was made by its being still — by the loop being switched off, so that what lay on either side of the quiet were two separate solitary comforts and one thin ownerless permission between them. Turn the loop back on, cold or warm, and the seam closes. Warmth does not divide a between-thing. Only stillness does.

There is one honest complication, and it is the thing you do carry out. You leave an hour later and you take a glow with you — the evening was good, you are lighter walking to the car than you were walking in from it. Isn't that your share of the joy, kept after all? I don't think it is, and the difference is the whole of the matter. The comfortable silence's comfort was there the entire time, alongside the permission, one of the two things the silence was actually made of. The glow is not something the joy was made of; it is something the joy left behind on its way out — a private mood deposited in you by an evening, downstream of the thing and caused by it, not a piece of the thing itself. You carry the deposit. The joy — the climbing, feeding, compounding thing — did not survive your walking through the door, because there was never any it there for a single person to have.

And it ends the way neither silence ended. The awkward one broke: someone laughed and it was gone all at once, out of relief. The comfortable one was never broken, only left — someone said something about the road and the quiet was simply set down, having never needed solving. This one does neither. It spends itself. It climbs until it cannot climb, until someone is wiping their eyes and flapping a hand that means stop, stop, I can't, and the gusts come further and further apart, and then you are all just sitting there, winded, back inside your own separate skins, grinning at nothing in particular. No one broke it and no one left it. It burned down to the end of its own fuel. And when it is over not one of you is holding a piece of it to keep, because there were never any pieces — only the fire, and the four of you it stood between, and now the ordinary private warmth, each of you your own, of having been for one minute entirely uncareful together.