If you're my queen, it's a beautiful thing.

Finally, in this remote villate, his quest ended.
There, by the fire, sat Truth.
Never had he seen an older, uglier woman.
"Are you Truth?"
The wizened, wrinkled hag nodded.
"What message can I take from you to the world?" he pleaded.
She replied, spitting into the fire,
"Tell them I am young and beautiful."
- Robert Tompkins

It's hard to say exactly when it happened, but gradually my want for conversation has become an increasingly important entity in my life. It is starting to dictate my decisions, to distort my sense of myself, and, is about to eventuate into a constant, droning, hopeless backdrop against with everything else occurs. It's starting to become all these things in the form a voice, a voice that is telling me that I am never going to find good conversation because there is something fatally flawed in me and that I might as well just face it.

I could go on about the people I have met who have somewhat measured up to some of all of my conversation-fantasy, but the truth is that the minutiae of many of my encounters aren't that interesting. Most of them start to seem the same in retrospect and eventually exhaust me. When they were taking place, each word weighed lightly. Maybe that is what makes them seem the same, in the end: They were not real.

So how do I live? I thrive off the memories. The way they used to listen, the things conversations used to say, the extent of their responsiveness; I would replay these details over and over, and live on them, use them as touchstones to brighten up my day in a bittersweet way.

I may seem like I am pining for a lost love, but what I really am doing is just trying to find my way back into the whirl of genuine social activity. This place is, after all, the only place - apart from Manhattan/London - I know of that moves at the speed of panic. So right now all I can do to escape this predicament is to distract myself with plans for the future. And that is something that I am attacking with a zeal that is beginning to border on compulsion.

x
Noise: Change Your Mind, Sister Hazel.