Strangers are polite to each other. That’s what politeness is for. It’s a good system for elevators and cash registers and the guy who sits next to you on a plane. It keeps everything calm by keeping everything empty.
And then somebody disagrees with you at a table, out loud, while everyone else goes quiet and stares at their drink. Your face gets hot. Something in you rises up to fight back. And underneath all of that, if you’re honest, there’s a small strange relief, because someone finally treated you like a person who could take it.
I don’t trust peace the way I used to. Not the real thing. The version people mean when they say “I don’t want drama.” Sometimes that’s genuine. But a lot of the time it translates to: don’t matter to me enough to fight about. Peace like that isn’t the absence of conflict. It’s the absence of contact. You can’t fight with someone you’ve decided not to believe in, because fighting costs something. It costs attention, heat, and the risk of being wrong in front of another person. Politeness is what we do for people we don’t intend to know.
You can tell a good fight from a bad one by whether the person stays in the room. A fight that wants to end the relationship sounds different from a fight that assumes the relationship continues. People who are already leaving start agreeing with you. Agreement from somebody on their way out is cheap, it costs nothing, they’re just being polite about the exit.
The body knows the difference too. The volume climbs on its own, nobody decided it. Your hands do that small shaking thing after, and half the time you end up laughing, and you’re somehow closer than before the fight. I don’t fully understand the mechanics of that. I just know I’ve watched people stay close through a screaming match that would have been a friendship-ending silence anywhere else. Silence is where things actually die. Fights are loud because something in there is still alive.
The internet gets this wrong in a way that makes me tired. It fights to make the other person stop existing, not to be met. That’s not a fight, it’s an ambush. A fight wants an answer. An ambush wants a body. The whole point of arguing with someone is that they’re still there when it’s over. Changed or not changed. Still a person. Still in the room.
This is also why I trust rooms with pits in them. A hundred people slam into each other and walk out smiling with no voices left. From the outside it looks like violence. From the inside it’s the opposite. It’s collision between people who trust the room. You fall, and hands pick you up before the song ends. Nobody in a pit is being attacked. They’re being included. It’s the cleanest proof I know of that impact and harm are two different things, and everyone in the building knows the difference without a word being exchanged.
So I want to be argued with. Really argued with, by someone who read the whole thing and pushes back on the part I said carelessly. That is the highest compliment I know how to recieve.
I’m not telling you to go start fights. I’m telling you to notice what it means when someone bothers to have one with you. Maybe the people who’ve never pushed back have never gotten close enough to. The ones who fight with you and stay? Those are the ones who decided you were worth the argument.