The Sound of Silence

I am a terrible conversationalist. I don't "chat." I don't like doing it on the phone and I don't do it in person. I am not the person you want to invite to come over for tea. I will sit there on your chintz sofa and dully stare at your china and wait for your phone to ring.

Maybe it is the years of forced isolation...maybe I am just really dull or stupid....or maybe I just don't CARE enough about anything. My facebook status for a while was, "I don't have CRS, I just DGF (Don't Giva Fuck)" and it is really true. I just don't have "deep thoughts" on significant subjects that I feel are worthy of discussing. I would rather sit in silence and listen to the insects and the wind, the crunch of the sand under my hands, to hear the freight train of a California Condor as he rises from the depths, than to talk about oil spills or politics, or boys or whether caffeine is the dark lord, or anything else. I would rather sit still and listen to the wind chimes, than anything on television, and I would rather lie on a picnic table under a vast ocean of blackness that silently spins around my body! I would rather swaddle my ears with big headphones and close my eyes to the world and become enveloped and surrounded by sound, than have to create meaningful sounds of my own!

The idle "chatter" of people talking about nothing confuses me. Is it because I so often HAVE no one to talk to? Or rather, no one to simply LISTEN? I am more accustomed to quiet, perhaps, more capable of being silent for long stretches than most people I know. Do your lips ever stick together when part them for the first time during the day sometime around noon to order a sandwich? Does the sound of your own voice sometimes surprise you?

Mine does.