Textual Relations

And then they woke up.

Or that’s what it felt like. She knew she should have said something, something embracing, to comprehend and overwrite the silence instead of just filling it. But she didn’t know how to talk to him. Difficult to know which role to play. Saint of the Impossible? The Other Woman? Incidental Factor? Maybe she should just pull a Mary Poppins act, disappear now that the family unit was on the mend. Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking, after all. And what would happen to me, may I ask, if I loved all the children I said goodbye to?

It was easier to talk to him when he wasn’t there. Then at least she got a chance to shape her words a bit, sound them out, write a script she could be proud of. The difficulty was trying to condense it down into 160 characters, with space enough for intros and fillers. I don’t know what to say to you? It sounded like something her mother would say, probably had said in some argument or other. Too confrontational, too much of an ending. How about I don’t know how to talk to you any more? Melodramatic: there wasn’t much of an any more to speak of, after all, and besides it smacked of Hollywood breakdown.

Other people’s words. She had to try and come up with something that sounded more her own. I feel like... what exactly? I'm seventeen again sprang to mind, but she didn't want to tell that story, the epic non-romance conducted via MSN Messenger when the girlfriend wasn't around. Besides, that wasn't it exactly. More like the novelty of me wore off, or maybe my best before date ran out. Nothing special was a little too emo, really, though she still had the t-shirt, the song half-written in her head, an unfinished anthem of faltering self-esteem. Shakespeare still interrogated her about that one sometimes. What's ought but as 'tis valued?

I don't know... seemed too obvious, epistemological uncertainty sort of being her calling card and all. It didn't really get you anywhere. But she needed the don't, and she was getting sick of this now. I don't like... was better, but it sounded like the beginning of an accusation. She had to modify it somehow, play it by inches, let go of the anger and just tiptoe into some sort of reopening of communications.

Unable to find the right phrase, in the end she just tumbled them all together. I don't like feeling like I don't know how to talk to you. Clumsy, but then this whole evening had made her feel clumsy: she wasn't sure she knew how to be anything else right now. Besides, looked at from a literary perspective it had a certain poetic aptness: an almost-antimetabole with feeling in the middle, unravelling itself as it stumbled into its more simplistic second clause. We are not my only self-critic indeed. Her Director of Studies would be proud.

She bit her lip, pressed ‘send’, and instantly wondered if she’d done the right thing. There was such a thing as companionable silence, after all, and what more could you expect from a person on standby? Perhaps it would have been better to say nothing at all...