Everyone Has a Tell

on sovereignty, signals, and the small betrayals that make us legible.

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There’s a private thrill in noticing the part of someone that doesn’t want to be understood.

The parts of them that are organized in rows of cans in the basement of their cellular makeup. preserved. The corners and valleys that are untouched by explanation. Untouched by performance.

You begin to sense it in the pauses. In the way they let certain thoughts pass without finishing them, or without having concern with how they landed. In the way their attention drifts toward something interior, something they refuse to make public, even in affection. What this is isn’t a performance art, or anything dramatic. It’s sovereignty.

A refusal to be made fully legible.

That refusal carries its own kind of hotness.

It resists any sort of conquest-style living. Because it insists that a person can remain partly their own, even in closeness, fuck, especially in the closeness. Especially in desire. There is dignity in that distance, an elegance in the choice not to surrender every contour of the self for the sake of being KNOWN.

And yet, here is the camp of it, the theater: everyone has a tell.

No matter how composed, how disciplined, how certain they are that nothing slips, something always does them in. A gesture too deliberate. A sudden stillness or silliness. The smallest tightening at the edge of the mouth when a particular subject or idea gets floated through the room.

I guess I’ve always had a weird way of figuring these tells out. Secretly, it’s a little private delight, the kind that comes from knowing the game is never as clean as people pretend.

the flicker, the giveaway, the tiny collapse of composure that says:

here is where I keep the real thing.

It becomes almost playful, this noticing!!

A social ritual with edge. Your own private game. You sit there, polite, charming, perfectly civilized; while inside you are quietly tallying signals stacked in the neat towers of your brain. There really is no gain in this racket ; only to feel the delicious awareness that beneath every polished surface, there is always a tender sliver of truth waiting to show itself.

What I’ve realized in all of this is that the most compelling people are not transparent, but composed of fragments they reveal only by accident. That what slips through the cracks: the tell, the pause, the nearly hidden reaction is often more revealing than anything spoken outright.

all images are film stills from Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). Czechoslovak New Wave Forever is just so fucking dreamy.

thanks for reading my shit poetry and prose!

I actually love each and every one of you