Too Much Information

a very short story

She can’t say simply “thank you” even though how many times she’s been taught to. But no, with her it’s always another faux pas. 

For example, it’s a party and a new acquaintance she sees for the second time in her life says to her, as if a bit surprised himself “You’re nice! I even told my family: “She’s nice, I like her! Always smiling”.

He has kind eyes, and she feels the immediate need to somehow put things in balance where they supposedly belong-telling him “oh, I’m either smiling, or crying, you remember, like in a Heine’s poem?”

Then she notices a slight change in the distance between them, as if the new acquaintance is now surprised even more, but maybe less pleasantly, and even takes a small step back.

It’s always like that with her, she’s giving too much information, and people plainly don’t understand what it has to do with the comment they made, or question they asked, and grow impatient, or decide she’s weird.

Also, she can be agitated, she knows that and often preludes with “sorry, I am very chatty lately, and if I’m wandering too much off topic, just tell me, will you? Or I’ll never stop talking”. 

But it’s not that easy to just tell somebody like her to stop talking, if one doesn’t want to be blunt.

 Especially as one is getting dizzy from all this stream of consciousness, and in the end, he can’t hear anything for real, and gives up, just watches how her face constantly changes, from ugly to beautiful and back, with some cosmic speed. 

Sometimes she gets quiet though and her stare goes strangely vacant.  

Once a man asked her “I wonder what you’re thinking about”, in one of these moments that are supposed to be somehow definitive in a relationship’s fate.

Only she never answered him, maybe she didn’t know herself, and maybe she also wasn’t sure in his sincere interest, maybe she took it as a filler in between kisses she didn’t really wanted, it’s strange to want the kisses until you get kissed, and after, but not in the process, and nothing could change that, even presumable interest of him, sincere or feigned, in her thoughts. 

So, our hero stayed with a memory of her vacant stare, but not only, because she is a fair person, after all, and felt the need to put things in balance, yet again, which meant sharing something else, giving too much of another information, if not about her thoughts, then she could compensate it with undressing, for example, and that’s what she did. 

That’s the way of sharing that was very familiar to her, which doesn’t really require being present, and when vacant stare even can be fitting and welcomed, under the circumstances. 

Then she stopped though this practice too, and people around must put up either with too much information, including sudden lines from poetry, or her looking somewhere, and not answering what she’s thinking about, even if asked. 

************

***I’m reading, and it somehow seems to be a mirror, all of it, as if I’m cut in pieces, multiplied, and every bit of others’ writing-yours too- contains a shred of me, as if we were all tiny droplets-and then it’s a fog, made of us, made of us too, and it’s like a та самая тьма, что накрыла ненавидимый прокуратором Город.

I tell myself it is an illusion, it must be me, with my screwed up brains, that refuse to go back to their previous state, also not very enviable but at least explicable-yet what do I know, maybe only the sick are normal, or how it was, in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

It could have happenned, yet another quote, I remember too many, I might make series out of it all, I have the name ready for weeks, would you like me to?

That was a rhetorical question. Yet still.

Also, if one writes about something it’s likely to not come true, so maybe I’ll try it, sometime, just to make something not true, not true at all.

Strange, but when I say

Love,

I’m very sincere. I’d wish to love you less.

Or maybe not.

Love,

Chen/April.