The Geometry of We

The bratwurst stand at Viva Vienna smells exactly like every other bratwurst stand at every other outdoor festival I've ever attended, which is to say it smells like something a German grandmother would approve of and a cardiologist would not. I'm standing close enough that the steam fogs my glasses, which might be intentional. Foggy glasses buy you approximately forty-five seconds of social invisibility.

It's a Saturday in May. The grass is still damp from last night. Someone's child is crying three stalls to my left with the sustained commitment of a professional, and everywhere around me, couples are arriving in that particular way couples arrive at outdoor festivals—hand in hand, coordinated sunglasses, the quiet confidence of people who have someone to hold their drink while they find the porta-potty.

I came alone.

This is not, technically, a problem. I have a beer. I have forty-three dollars in my wallet and functioning knees. By any reasonable actuarial measure, I'm doing fine. And yet the couple to my right keeps glancing at me the way people glance at a single sock on the laundry room floor. Concerned. Slightly puzzled. Wondering if there's a match somewhere.

I take a long pull of my beer and look into the middle distance with great purpose.

Here's what occurs to me, standing there: we is doing an enormous amount of work for a two-letter word. My neighbor uses it constantly. We were thinking of redoing the deck. We don't love what they've done with the corner lot. We, in his case, is him and his wife, a woman I've met exactly once, who told me she finds cilantro offensive. And yet we conjures a committee. A constituency. A groundswell of considered suburban opinion. I, by contrast, just stands here at the bratwurst stand, squinting, looking like it might be waiting for someone.

I try the waiting-for-someone look for a while. Intense gaze toward the entrance, the practiced stillness of a man with plans. It works for maybe four minutes before I run out of entrance to stare at.

The cover band starts something vaguely resembling Fleetwood Mac. The crowd drifts toward the stage with the slow collective movement of people who aren't sure they want to commit but don't want to miss anything either, and I drift with them, beer in hand, past the kettle corn stand and the man in the Redskins jersey explaining something to nobody in particular, past the teenagers photographing their own feet, their cups, the sky, each other's cups. I watch them for a moment—the way they photograph everything as though documentation is the same as experience—and my hand moves toward my pocket. Old reflex. The kind built for someone on the other end who'd want a photograph of a bratwurst stand, who'd send back a single emoji you spent longer than you'd admit trying to decode.

I leave the phone where it is.

There's a bench near the far edge of the grounds, just past the vendor with the hand-stamped tea towels, and I find it the way you find things at these events—not by looking, but by wandering until something stops you. I sit. The crowd is audible but distant now. A dog tied to a nearby stroller regards me with calm, professional indifference. I finish the beer. I don't take out my phone. I watch a child negotiate aggressively with a balloon and lose.

Somewhere in that stillness, something just quietly puts itself down. Not a moment of clarity. More like a jacket you've been carrying all afternoon that you finally stop carrying.

I get up, toss the cup, and walk back through the crowd without performing anything. No waiting-for-someone eyes, no busy-phone hands. Just moving through it, taking up exactly the space I take up, stopping when something looks interesting, moving on when it doesn't.

On the way out, a man selling raffle tickets holds one toward me.

"Solo?" he says.

"We," I say, and keep walking.

He doesn't question it. Neither do I.

The parking lot smells like cut grass and exhaust. My car is where I left it, near a tree I chose as a landmark that turned out to be completely unremarkable among seven identical trees. I found it anyway. Here's to the solo adventurers—we're not alone, we're just running the experiment on our own terms. The sample size is one. The results are inconclusive.

Cheers.