I have come to realize that I am no longer an introvert, and perhaps I never was.
I like being alone sometimes, but not too much.
I need time, to recuperate, mend and think; a pause from the noise and filling it with my own music.
But I love people.
I love their faces, mind and bodies, all varying and authentic.
I love the words that pour from the mouths, some vulgar and others gentle and pleasant.
And my friends whose minds are like an open book,
Whose jokes make me choke with laughter
Whose closeness sometimes too close, I become irritable when I see their faces too often.
Even the people I do not know, with fluorescent signs above their heads reading:
“Enter with caution”
and
“Interpret gently”
They are a cog in a machine that begs me to ask how it works.
All of these people, and these people places.
Like my apartment, marked by the habits of those whom habit it
and marked by those who came before.
A lecture hall, with students dozing off, eyes glazed to screens
while their professor goes on tangents about their daughter.
Or at the back of a party in a cloud of smoke, hands grasping red plastics cups
filled with liquid that greases our gears, making it easier to open up.’
How I wonder what I could learn with their lips on mine, like my questions did their minds.
I am an extrovert.
A sieve, straining through people’s goodness and people’s badness, sitting on the shore of their lives
letting each wave crash over me.
~
Image: yannic_vom_kanal
