Two Feet Apart

There's a lunch spot in my neighborhood I go to almost every day, and a friend behind the bar there I've come to know well enough to call a real friendship, the kind where the big things get talked about, not just the small ones. Through her I've come to know another woman too, someone she cares about, someone in the same industry, who I run into far less often. But the times we have crossed paths included enough real conversation, about life, about business, that something like rapport had already formed between us.

This week I ran into her twice in three days. Both times, even directly in her line of sight, she gave no sign of noticing me at all. The first time we were maybe two feet apart. The second time, a couple sat between us at the bar, and she was looking straight past them, straight at me, still nothing. Only once I moved, a small wave, a smile, did it become impossible not to acknowledge me. Then it was warm. Genuine even.

I don't think either moment was really about me being missed by accident.

What I Think Was Actually Happening

I try to meet everyone, her included, as a fellow member of a species built over two million years for connection, curiosity, and safety in each other's presence, which is what lets me delay categorizing for as long as I possibly can, on the chance that who someone actually is gets room to show itself before anything else decides for me first. That's what I choose to bring into a room and it always feels good.

This isn't about gender. It's about what any of us come to understand, through inheritance, about what our choices actually are in a given moment, including the moments when a choice was never really available to begin with. In this case, her nervous system has almost certainly learned, through real and repeated experience in an industry where safety often depends on reading people fast, to match first and lock in, quietly, without conscious choice ever entering into it: I see you, you resemble something already stored in me, so that's what you are, now and going forward. Not a decision made and later revisited. Just pattern matching completing itself before anything else gets the chance to register. That's not paranoia. That's protection built the hard way, likely shaped by people who have nothing at all to do with me.

This isn't really a question of depth, and framing it that way would be too binary. A relationship can stay entirely casual and still be accurate, two people seeing each other clearly for who they are, without ever needing to go any further than that. What's actually lost here isn't depth. It's accuracy, replaced by a fixed category before anything real gets the chance to register.

What lets me meet her that way isn't confidence, and it isn't the ease of moving through the world as a man. It's the lens itself, one that doesn't assign gender or role before anything else, open to whoever she actually turns out to be, nothing decided in advance. In that same moment, scanning a room full of strangers, she's likely working from whatever's already stored, matched and settled before I even register as anyone in particular.

That's the whole difference. Not two people seeing each other differently by choice. Two entirely different instruments doing the looking.

I don't say any of this with hurt feelings. I say it with a kind of clear, quiet sadness, the kind that doesn't ask for anything to change. Her caution isn't the problem. It's an artifact of something much older than either of us, the long shift from all one thing to all separate things, and everything that shift compounded across generations into a quiet, inherited default: that people are, until proven otherwise, flawed, broken, not to be trusted.

What if repetition doesn't help here at all, not because a mask might be worn too well to catch, but because the sorting act itself doesn't make room for genuine as an option at all?

This idea runs alongside Chapter 9 of The Lens That Changes Everything, on the body's intelligence, and how no amount of goodwill can override what a nervous system has learned it needs for safety. If it's the kind of thing that stays with you, Being Jonas Wilder brings it into the room, live.