Offices are awkward. Suddenly, for no compelling reason, you begin spending most of your waking hours in intimate contact with the same strangers every day. You are obligated into friendship, necessitated into a camaraderie whose boundaries are anything but clear. Is it weird if you want to be friends, or worse if you do not? The situation is repetitive but lacks security: we all know we are just circumstantial friends. This is awkwardness at its most quotidian, inane and purest form.
What is it exactly? An emotion? A fabrication? A blinding moment of unforgiving clarity? There are awkward people, awkward situations, awkward thoughts to have at awkward times. There is the word itself, which is wonderfully onomatopoetic in its own peculiar way. It is something that always matters more or less than you think, and never just as much. Something of awkwardness pervades urban life in general, underwriting the briefest of glances and interactions with worlds of potential mishaps and misunderstandings.
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The quality of the awkwardness can determine into which category a relationship falls. Strangers, passers-by on the street, exist only through its lens, each of you jumbled, incoherent fragments of action and perception to the other. Friends are made through awkwardness shared, inventing ways of laughing and living together that only we can understand.
This is largely because of that first awkwardness, the thing itself, the one that needs no explanation and from which all other awkwardnesses stem: puberty. An awkward word whose component parts are scarcely less awkward than the whole, whose mere mention makes me want to go crawl under a rock until the world has moved to a different backyard.
Locker rooms, bathrooms, classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, bedrooms, basements, kitchens, the outdoors. Just thinking about it is enough to make me blush burningly and send me flashing back to gangly teenage years and the discovery that things are all so much grosser and more complicated and above all more awkward than you thought they were yesterday.
