Noncommunicating

I often find myself stuck in the middle of the most boring conversations ever, and I am no longer able to mask my obvious discomfort, despite having an actual mask on my face! I fail to engage, so I stay quiet, patiently listening at times and zoning out at other times, mostly because I usually cannot relate to anything the other person is talking about. It is only when you get older that you begin to realise that you cannot keep spending your days listening to people and thinking, “No, I do not relate to that.” That is when you should decide not to listen to everything anymore and let your bubble get the stronger walls it deserves.

Here are my borderline inappropriate, conversation-killing responses to a few questions that people had asked me just at the end of their stretched-out halves of the conversations:

1. I buy two pair of shoes per season and wear them out
2. I have never been to that place you were talking about
3. I am not friends with that many people, and we see each other about twice a year
4. Sorry, I did not quite understand what you were talking about earlier
5. Sorry, I have to leave, I am already late for a meeting
6. No, I shop online
7. I have a similar headache at the moment.

I am beginning to get tired, and I am pretty sure that people are getting tired of conversing with a silent person who keeps staring off into space and refuses to offer no insight whatsoever. Something must be wrong with me.

Since I am still obsessing over Fernando Pessoa’s poetry, a slightly relevant snippet from one of his poems from the book, I Have More Souls Than One translated by Jonathan Griffin, is in order:

“Yes, I am tired,

And ever so slightly smiling

At the tiredness being only this –

In the body a wish for sleep,

In the soul a desire for not thinking

And, to crown all, a luminous transparency

Of the retrospective understanding.

And the one luxury of not now having hopes?

I am intelligent: that’s all.

I have seen much and understood much of what I have seen,

And there is a certain pleasure even in the tiredness this brings us,

That in the end the head does still serve for something.”

Photo by Amir Esrafili from Pexels