Are you even listening???

Are you even listening?
He just wanted to talk because it’s always just talk. They always want us to just talk but that gives the false impression that we’re actually having a conversation. Don’t be fooled, we aren't. With my friends real conversation is a lost art, kind of like chadoo*. People kind of know how to do it but it’s only a pale imitation of what conversation used to be like before people started learning that I knew how to listen. Once they knew I could listen they stopped letting me tlak. What bugs me is that I didn’t notice it until recently. I’ve slowly lost my share in the conversation. I’m more often just witnessing someone’s verbal masturbation. Oh good grief I’m an ecchi magazine. I need a shower.
I don’t know where I learned to listen. I think somewhere along the way people decided I was a good listener because I didn't have much to say when I was younger. It was good then, to be praised for my listening. But as I got older and my listening got me more friends; I started to have more to say. It’s at the point now where I’m having my side of the conversation in my head and somehow when there’s finally space to speak all that comes out is “nnn”* or “hai”*. Then again it’s not like I have any big problems compared to the people who call me to just talk. Wlel maybe theirs aren’t big problems either as they tend to be the kind of problems that just need a little release, like a fantasy that becomes less potent once you act on it. They just need to tell me what’s going on and then it’s over, a little better even. They clap me on the shoulder, promise to buy me coffee next time. They tell me if I need anything to let them know.
But I don’t know if I need anything. I’ve just lost the ability to say what I need. I’m so used to having conversations in my head, like I am now, that I’ve forgotten how to have a real one. I suppose the lost art of conversation is lost on me as well. In a lot of ways conversations are tiring when I do manage to actually have them. It’s a lot less energy to just sit back and listen. It’s the precieving that takes a lot of energy, or rather the trying not to notice. When you’re the focus of everyone’s verbal fap fest you end up noticing a lot about human behavior. If I passed the test I’d major in psychology but there’s no way I’d do this for a living. But the bad side is that once you see how people act it’s a lot easier to infer what people aren’t saying. There are lines to read between that you didn’t even realize existed. It’s the way that Aya sits around Kochi, the sigh over a cup of coffee, the thrust of a filled rice bowl. It’s all pregnant with meaning that I really wish I didn’t get. It gets caught up in this complicated web that they wove in my head. Aya likes Kochi but Koichi is more into her best friend Arisa who is into Kochi but not as much as she’s into Kazu. Kazu sighs over the coffee because he’s too absorbed in baseball to deal with it all and he just wants to hit the damn ball. The rice bowl is actually unrealated to my school drama it’s a family drama. Something is wrong between my parents and it’s the one thing I can’t figure out. I want to know what’s going on but my parents keep things close to their chest so until the shoe drops I’ll never know. It would be best if I’d just never noticed and continued in my blissful world where my parents marriage is just like everyone elses marriage. Then again maybe it is but none of my friends ever talk about their families. Romantic drama is inheriently more important that family drama. It gets higher ratings after all.
I’m tired of making sense of the world and I want to retire from it in a lot of ways. I feel like an old emperor. I am in the world with no real power. My role is ceremonial, though that makes it sound nicer than my masturbation metaphor so I’ll follow this one instead. It sounds like something you could work into a conversation and people would thinkit was really cool and insightful. Then I’d pull out a cigarette and be even cooler. I’m a legend in my own mind. I’m a great conversationalist in my own head, probably because I even listen to myself. These thoughts want to come out but at the same time they don’t. To be forceful, to tell Aya I really don’t give a flying fuck about if Kochi will even like her back, to scream at my parents to just have it out, to yell that I have something to say, isn’t something I’m used to. I’m not content to watch the world but at this point its my own option. Anything else and people get impatient and ask “Are you even listening???”
Chadoo- tea ceremony
Nnn- “ummhmm” used to indicate that you are listening to someone but not nessicarily agreement
Hai- “Yes” again in this case it’s used to indicate that you’re listening.
On what looked to be a fairly fruitless train ride to Mitaki I saw this guy get on. He was walking with another guy but looked like he couldn’t wait to get away. I had to try not to stare because he leaned against the door of the train in an open display of frustration and I really wanted to know what was bothering him. He just closed his eyes and didn’t seem to be sleeping because he was standing up. Maybe he was just looking for some quiet.