There are some days when you just don’t have that much to say. Some days when, without provocation, you can get away with saying hardly anything. I say “get away with” because there’s always so much pressure to have something worth sharing, something the world needs to hear, and can only hear from your mouth, that when you don’t have anything, it’s nice to be able to disappear for a while: a guiltless understanding that, maybe for today, you don’t have to be the world’s herald… Well, not the “world’s” herald, maybe just your world’s herald.
Take this kid for example. He’s been sitting quietly in the seat just to the right of the lower left corner of the room (if you were to look at it from the roof) for the past hour and a half. Quiet and listening. Listening more than anybody else in the room, even more than the people intently involved in a conversation about other conversations. It’s not hard to do, he would assure you. In the simplest terms, requiring the least amount of physical effort, asking no more of the mental condition than for it to open itself up to accepting and acquiring all the verbal stimuli it’s willing to accept and acquire, you… close your mouth. And suddenly, the world changes.
Not only do you hear more, you see more. You actually see the person sitting across the room. You see the subconscious response: the flowing, ebullient bravado of smiles and laughter. You see people as who they are, or whom they wanted you to see, and you see the moments of self-consciousness when they feel they’ve strayed from that image. A smile that fades to guarded silence. And in that moment, you want to be heard. You want to tell her that you’ve been listening, and that she’s beautiful.
But he doesn’t. Or at least he won’t. He’s been sitting there all night wishing people wouldn’t talk so loudly. He just hopes this doesn’t turn into one of those times when being quiet makes him more noticeable. There’s nothing worse than being dragged out of your comfort zone because it’s intruding on everybody else’s, especially when that intrusion is a purposeful act of avoiding it. Do people universally see that as depressing? Or creepy? There seems to be this widespread unspoken agreement that when someone sits quietly and listens, especially in a room full of people, it’s somehow an invasion of everyone’s privacy, or an indication that this person is socially inept.
But, for someone who’s been listening for so long, it gets easier to see when it’s going to happen. When someone pulls the conversation around to you and how you haven’t said anything the entire night. It’s like watching a long carpet unroll. Someone starts it, others jump in to keep it going, passing it to people further down the line, more join in to chase it and continue the fun, until finally, everybody reaches the same point, the same obvious conclusion: that the carpet ends. Even though you’ve unrolled it before, still nothing was hidden in that last roll, which means nothing will pop out when it lies fully open. And in the silence, there’s a moment of expectation, of wondering what to do next, but the carpet does nothing… It’s just there. It may have always been there, but now that it’s in the spotlight, people become aware, just for a moment, that eventually… they will walk on it.
He answers their question. “I just don’t have much to say, I guess.” And so… they resume walking.
