Practice Round
The best arguments are the ones where both people end up somewhere neither of them expected.
Alex || Jamie || Growing Closer || Debate
November arrived with the particular Portland commitment to grey that made you feel the city was expressing a mood. Jamie and I were in the library every Tuesday and Thursday, and on some Saturdays, and occasionally on Sunday evenings when Mrs. Callahan had assigned something due Monday and we had both left it too long. The dynamic of our partnership had settled into something I was having more and more difficulty categorizing as only professional. We argued. Constantly, productively, with the specific pleasurable friction of two people who cared enough about the quality of the thinking to push back on each other rather than accommodating mediocrity for the sake of comfort. Jamie was the most rigorous thinking partner I had ever had. They didn’t let me hide behind technical excellence. They kept pulling the argument back toward the actual question, the real one, the one underneath the framework. “What do you actually think?” they kept asking, in various forms. “Not what can you argue. What do you think?”
On a Sunday in early November, an argument we were having about the limits of the resolution — specifically about whether authenticity required courage in all circumstances or only in circumstances where the disclosure carried significant risk — crossed a line from the theoretical into something more immediate. Jamie said: “The resolution is specifically interesting when the cost of disclosure is social or familial, because that’s where the courage question is most meaningful. It’s easy to be authentic about things that carry no risk. The question is whether you can be authentic when the disclosure might cost you something you value.” They were looking at me in the careful way. I was looking at the table. “And you think that’s where courage comes in?” I said. “I think that’s where you find out whether you have it,” they said. “The disclosure happens and then you find out what you’re made of.” “Or the disclosure doesn’t happen,” I said. “And then you find out what you’re made of in a different way.” Jamie was quiet for a moment. “Is this still about the resolution?” they said. “Technically,” I said. They looked at me for a long beat. Not the one-beat-longer beat — longer than that. Something in the library’s late afternoon quiet expanded around the silence. “Alex,” they said, very carefully. “You can tell me things,” they said. “Whenever you’re ready. Or never, if that’s what you choose. But I want you to know that anything you tell me stays where it lands. I’m not — I’m not going to do anything with it except hold it.” I looked up. Their face was open in the specific way that it went when they weren’t using any of the easy confidence as a surface, when they were just themselves, which was the face I had started looking for without realizing I was looking for it. “I know,” I said. “Thank you.” They nodded. They went back to the argument. “Okay,” they said. “So where does courage enter — is it in the decision or the act?” We rebuilt the argument. The library closed around us. When we left into the grey Portland evening and split off at the corner — Jamie going north, me going south — Jamie paused at the corner and looked back. “Hey,” they said. I turned. “For what it’s worth,” they said. “Whatever it is you’re working on. The answer is yes.” They turned and walked north. I stood at the corner for a moment. The answer is yes. To what question? I thought about the third index card and the word Soon and the answer to a question I hadn’t asked out loud yet. I walked home in the grey November air. Something in my chest felt different from the usual weight. It felt, tentatively and with significant uncertainty, like the early stages of lightness.