Talking to Strangers

I have too many tabs open and my brain is fried on nothing of use or substance. They say the unexamined life is not worth living but honest to Christ there probably ought to be limits.

We examine and study and worry ourselves to death over every stupid goddamn thing these days. And some of us, myself included, will obsess to the point of anxious hysteria even if only in our panicked little minds.

The thing is you wouldn’t know my insides if you met my outsides someplace, well. out there. Strangers on the internet know bits of my soul most people who claim to know me never will and this is a very strange place to find oneself as she makes her way through an over sensitized desensitized world.

There is a pace and a tone set by the rich and powerful meant to lock us into patterns we are supposed to smile and nod along about but the friction starts the minute you realize it is all a game and the game sure as hell is not rigged in your favor.

I read an article just yesterday about people trying to decide if it is morally correct anymore to make more people. Do you actually create a human baby on purpose and plunk it down in the middle of a dumpster fire and hope for the best.

I have no intention of answering this question here in my little one woman blog show but it is a question on the hearts, minds, and souls of those who are willing to entertain it. As for me, I am well and over it entirely. It’s enough trouble to look after myself let alone any more of me.

In a weak but earnest attempt to get out of my head and into my body, I pull on some leggings and walk the park and watch as a handsome young man with impossibly beautiful chestnut hair feeds bread to the slick teal-headed ducks alongside the river. Wind rushes through the trees and I pull on my army green jacket for the first time in many months.

I light up a cigarette and take a seat on an empty bench near a silver rock face, removed just enough to be able to observe the few other humans and their various dogs dotting the scene under a canopy of orange and yellow foliage. As my eyes take in more of the chestnut haired fellow, I think of a man I once knew who let me be my whole self with him back when I thought I knew who my whole self was.

There is a certain charmed electricity at the beginning of a relationship wherein you let yourself go although that isn’t really the entire truth of it. The truth is you curate yourself like you were a museum. Pick your favorite pieces and place them on prominent display hoping you chose right and by ‘right’ you mean he digs you.

This guy though, he made me feel so adored that I told him things I never told anybody else. It felt so easy and not wrong at all, to let those secrets fall all over the cliff of my mouth and into the dark abyss of him. I don’t know if people trust each other that way anymore. I don’t know if we are capable of it when we are so unsure of ourselves in ways previous generations never had to even consider or contemplate.

The world is fracturing and we can feel it in our bones, though we do not know how to speak it. But still we find some kind of warmth or magic in the way the quiet evening light falls through the shape of the trees and onto the shoulders of a beautiful mysterious stranger.

I stare up at the gray clouds moving in. Rain is on its way and so should I be. As I walk up the dirt path toward the parking lot, a cluster of dry dead leaves crunches loud beneath my feet. And just like that, it’s autumn in the city and everywhere else as far as the eye can see.