The novelty of my vanity assumes that I am proud for the first time, that I had somehow gone through life trodden down and exiled and low in self-motivation. It was instead misguided, misfired and untraceable. It is only now that I am following
the bread crumb trail that leads to home.
Your bravado is embarrassing. I had always poured that line, taken from the movie Reality Bites, through several filters to make sense of it. That you are not fooling as many people as you'd like to with your monologues about how your life is going, that you are more transparent than you would prefer. I have been on the giving and the receiving ends of such bravado, and it isn't any better on either side.
There are questions inside of me and there are questions being imposed on me from the outside, by other people, some by what they ask directly and others by what is omitted. It is like when someone asks you for spare change. They have to know you have some, so why do they ask? And when you tell them you don't have any, they know you do but you're just not going to give them any, but still you are understood. Something has been conveyed from underneath the words said, and, while we would prefer this not go on among people we claim have been invited into a sphere of intimate knowledge, it happens every day to each of us, even from the act of omission of any words at all. Someone's silence can convey almost more than their words, or the aversion to certain topics, whether subconscious or deliberate, is also saying something.
With all of these layers, it is almost impossible to require only a handful of them from people and discard the rest because of what you would prefer, to deny that the layers exist, even if you choose to not use them. And yet I am attempting this every day, often failing, often feeling incomplete by even trying.
It will always amaze me that we are able to communicate to one another at all, that anything we say or don't say, is ever understood as best as it could be. That, through all these hoops, there is predictability, there is friendship and love and understanding. That, for all the cries for evolution, humans have not managed to weed this out from their DNA.