I started playing poker on off nights because I had read a thing about quantum mechanics and it wouldn't let me alone.
The idea was this: a poker hand is a superposition. The cards are determined but from the player's point of view they are not — they are a cloud of probabilities that only resolve when someone shows. The decision you make inside that cloud is the only real variable. Everything else is fixed.
I wanted to see if I could feel the cloud.
I'm not a good player. I didn't study ranges. I didn't memorize anything. I played small stakes on a laptop in a corner of the sublet at 1 AM after shifts. I lost about four hundred dollars over the first three weeks. What I was paying for was the sensation of sitting inside the uncertainty.
What I started to notice was that the hands I played worst were the ones where I was trying hardest to be correct. The hands I played best were the ones where I let the cloud stay a cloud until the last possible moment.
This is probably not quantum mechanics. It's probably just poker. But I have a theory now that the mind you use to live in this city is the same mind you use at a table — the one that holds the unresolved hand long enough to act inside it.
I'm better at poker than I was three weeks ago. I am also, for the first time since I arrived, less afraid.