Sentimental Guy.

Pat.

Have you ever been on a phone chat line? It's full of middle-aged men whispering naughty secrets into a receiver, waiting for a sublime twenty something-year-old to respond to their sexual desire. It's really quite shit, but it passes time well when you have nothing to do.

Either way, it occured to me sometime ago that what happens on a phone chat line is the perfect painting of the time. Strangers bumping into one another for a minute, robbing eachother of some sort of dignity, not caring, not expressing, not emoting any sort of understanding or concern. Just quick, unjustified and silly grunts in the heat of a moment, in the dark corner of a house, all alone, locking another dirty secret in the depths of all our minds.

Maybe I expect too much from others.

When I talk to someone, it's because I want to understand. I want to be listened to, I want to listen and I want to feel changed when the exchange is over. Perhaps this is why I am in love with the man that I am in love with. I love talking to him. Do youknow how comforting it is to find someone who will *talk* to you? Who will discuss anything? Listen to the crap and the piss and the good and the great and anything that falls inbetween?

I never understood how it is difficult for people to communicate with one another. Or rather, how it is difficult to just talk.

We've lost so much in our inability to try. We've lost a bit of ourselves, a bit of what we could be. A bit of the past, a bit of understanding and a lot of love.

I don't want to move mountains with conversation and I suppose I'll take it from whomever is willing to converse. I am thirsty for other human interaction that isn't a fragmented moan through a receiver. I want to know everyone.

So I suppose I find it hard to imagine how someone like who I think you are finds it difficult to talk. Because this is what we're doing yeah? Talking?

You, I'm sure have so much to talk about, but maybe you just haven't found it yet. I don't know. Perhaps I'm completely wrong and we're meant to bump randomly into eachother for the sake of existence.

I've given up a lot of conversations for headaches, discomfort, ill feelings and grief. It bothers me severly that people dislike me because I can spell words 1/2 correctly, or know when to use a word here and not there, or just because of my pretentious college bangs, or what they heard about me from highschool. Pretenses, yeah? But I've bumped into you too many fucking times for me to just pass it off as another chance. Why is it so hard for you to talk, and why do you think that this is a pretense?

I'm not going to judge you, or poke fun at your explanations. It doesn't bother me any to sort through your explanation, I WANT to sort through it. You're intelligent and grownup. You must have experienced a world of things that I haven't in the past ten years, but you have nothing to say?

It's been ten years Pat. Pretenses or no pretenses, there has to be some middle ground in a fragmented friendship a decade old.

But perhaps I'm wrong and perhaps I am still young and too idealistic to understand that people just do not want to talk anymore. And if all I am to get from you is a grunt, then I expect I have a very disapointing future to grow into.

-diddums