Today is my birthday,
server time-wise, but I'm not telling you which birthday this is. You can guess for yourself.
Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday dear Awestruck, Happy Birthday to me!
Here are my musings, unrelated to birthday matters:
When I'm with my
real friends, I'm
quiet. In
elementary school I was
always one of the kids left inside at
the end of the week – one of the "
bad kids." What I mean is, the
teachers would give everyone a certain amount of
stars printed on a
square of paper at the beginning of the week.
Misbehavior was
punished with the crossing out of a star. If you
lost all your stars by
Friday, you had to stay inside and do
busy work while the other kids had an extra
recess.
Don't get me wrong, I was not a bad child, in fact I was always a smart, dorky girl who never really acted up. The reason for the superfluous amount of worksheets I complete on Friday afternoons was quite simple: excess talking counted as misbehavior. And I sure had a lot to say. No matter what else was going on. All these thoughts and observations and imaginative things just kept coming into my head with the demand to be spoken. Next thing I know, they would be coming out of my mouth. All the time. I could not shut-up. Even if you ask people now, people I'm in class with or people I know only socially, they'd most likely agree that I still have a lot to say. But when I'm with my best friends, I can be pretty quiet.
For my being so social, it is rather odd that my bestest friends tend to be so…… anti-social. I don't know when or how I got to be so quiet too. Maybe they've rubbed off on me. Maybe there is some Freudian explanation I don't even want to think about. But all that sort of stuff is very deep-seeded and takes a credit card to disclose, so perhaps not. Maybe we've just already talked about everything old, and nothing new has happened.
Now I'm not saying we don't talk. Sometimes we have conversations that go all night long. But the typically mindless chatter is turned off. A more accurate way to put it is: when no one can think of anything halfway good to say, we're quiet.
This quiet has its pluses and minuses. When there is no conversation to focus on, especially say, the morning after one of those all-night conversations (read: no sleep) it is very easy to… zone out.
Which is really where and when the story begins. There we were, five of us, walking down the street. This was one of those "morning-afters." And I, for one, was zoning. For some reason I became suddenly aware that no one had said anything for at least five minutes. I knew already that things got like this often. At the same time, at this instant, I found our peaceful, silent co-existence exceedingly interesting. Everyone knows how uncomfortable a silence has the ability to become. How great that ours wasn't!
I glanced over at everyone in their own little worlds. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the sun, or something I should ask Miss Cleo about. But fact is, when I am not talking a mile a minute, my brain tends to overcompensate by spinning it's gears twice as fast and less than half as coherently. Whatever the reason, I got rather twisted up in the moment. My head went all sappy thinking "Wow, my friends are so cool and this is just awesome and if I think of something interesting to say I can so it but no pressure, awww, wow! And so on in that vein. All this with everyone still maintaining the oblivious silence, and all still while walking down the sidewalk.
Now though it hasn't yet been obvious, I want you to know that the moral of this story does have something to do with the title – how I got hurt being quiet. I want everyone to know why not to get caught up with your drippy thoughts in some pretty little silent moment, especially if you haven't slept much. This looking at my friends, so silent and still walking down the sidewalk was all very well and good. But with my brain going all to mush, the physical world started to fade. It was fading quite nicely too, until – there is no way to put this delicately – my face met the all too real metal of a signpole. Yeah, that broke the silence.