Deep Questions for Random Chat

What are the small questions for

I had it typed out. "What are you scared your life will look like if nothing changes?" Sitting in the notes app at some hour I am embarrassed to admit, next to a grocery list from two weeks ago and a half-written reminder that just says "call back." I copied it. I went to the chat. And then I sat there with my thumb over the send and I deleted the whole thing, letter by letter, like that made it more polite.

Because here is the problem. We had been talking for maybe twenty minutes. Stranger from one of those random pairings. Nice enough. We had covered the weather where they were, the fact that neither of us could sleep, a short thing about a show they were halfway through and did not love. And then my brain decided this was the moment to ask them to narrate their worst quiet fear to a person whose name I did not know. At 1am. With my dishes in the sink behind me making that smell they make when you leave them.

I want to say I am good at this. I am not. I read somewhere once, or maybe I just decided, that a chat is better when you ask something that matters. So I keep loading these huge things into the chamber and then either firing them at people who flinch or, more often, deleting them and saying something about coffee.

So I deleted it and I tried the ordinary versions. The same thing, but small enough to carry.

what food do you make when you've stopped trying for the day

That one I actually sent. And they answered fast, which surprised me.

toast. but i butter it weird

I did not ask what weird meant. I should have. I was still thinking about my deleted question, which is a bad habit, sitting in a chat already gone while you compose the better one.

The thing I have figured out, slowly, and I am not sure I believe it on every night, is that the small question is not a watered down version of the big one. It arrives at almost the same place. If you ask someone what tab they keep open even though they know they will never use it, you find out something. The tab is a job application. The tab is a recipe for a person who moved out. The tab is a city they keep looking at flights to. You did not ask them anything frightening and they told you anyway, sideways, because you let them.

what tab have you had open for like a week

a flight to a place i'm not going to

oh

yeah

I left it there. I wanted to ask which place. I did not. I am trying to learn the part where you do not immediately reach for the follow up, because the follow up is usually me wanting more than the moment is offering.

Knot.chat is where most of this happens for me now, late, the random kind where you get a person and not a profile. I am not selling it. It is just the place where I keep relearning that the question I want to ask and the question I should ask are almost never the same one, and the gap between them is where I get into trouble.

Other ones I have collected, in the notes app, under the dead grocery list:

What errand turned strangely serious in your head. The bank thing that was not about the bank. The post office trip you rehearsed in the car.

Whose name do you keep in your phone for no reason you could explain to anyone. The contact you will not delete. Not because you will call. You know you will not call.

there's a name in my phone i can't delete

ex?

no. worse. my old boss who was nice to me once

That answer stayed with me longer than it should have. My old boss who was nice to me once. I do not even know this person. I closed the laptop after that, then opened it again, because that is what I do.

Where do you sit when you do not want anyone to ask how you are. This one I am almost afraid to send because the answer is usually a real place and people get quiet giving it to you. The far end of the couch. The car still in the driveway. The bathroom at work, which everyone says, which is somehow the saddest one because it is the same answer from everybody and we all think we invented it.

What object in your place would make the whole place feel wrong if it vanished. Not the expensive thing. People never say the expensive thing. They say a mug. A specific lamp. A chair nobody sits in.

what thing in your house would feel wrong if it disappeared

a chair my dad sat in. nobody sits in it now

do you sit in it

no

So that is the trade I keep making. I do not ask the person to be afraid out loud for me. I ask about toast, about a tab, about a chair, and they hand me the same thing the scary question was reaching for, except they are not bleeding for it, they just mention it and we move on, or we do not move on, but it was their choice either way.

The deleted question is still in my notes. I did not delete it from there, only from the chat. "What are you scared your life will look like if nothing changes." I think I keep it because some night I will be talking to someone and it will actually fit, the way a coat fits when it is finally cold enough, and I will send it and it will not be too much. I do not know when that night is. Probably not tonight. Tonight I have dishes I am not going to do and a coffee that is half gone and cold and I am still going to drink it, which is its own answer to one of these questions if you think about it, and I would rather not think about it.

Anyway. I am going to ask the next person about errands.