Every impossible conversation

I’m a really good talker. I can talk a lot. If it were possible to make people’s ears bleed, I’d have that as my special talent. I don’t have a fear of public speaking; I can do it, in any context, in front of any number of people. Granted I still get nervous before I talk, but once I’m on a roll, it just comes out. Like writing. I write a lot like how I speak, and before I know it the page is full. I rarely get nervous about writing. Unless I’m writing about my lack of talent….

For someone who is such a great a talker, I find with the one I love I end up in impossible conversations and I can’t find the words I want to say, the ones I say come out all wrong, the reaction I get is not at all the one I was hoping for, and then the emotion gets behind and in front of the words, and the impossible conversation winds up with lots of impossible, and not much conversation at all. How does that happen? How can it be that someone who is so articulate can get about three words out and then decide writing it out is probably a better option, and bails out to do that?

It’s not every conversation with him. We have awesome conversations most of the time. But if I have to ask for something I need, well holy crikey Moses, there is (literally) literary chaos.

The truth, I need you. I need you to listen to me and all the crazy, funny, intensssse, over-detailed stories of my day. I want to tell you every new thing I learnt and what that was like and how I felt about that and how excited I am about it.
I’d love you to watch me, that way you do that makes my heart skip, as though I am speaking magic. I want to know what you think, what’s going on in your world, even if it is totally different to mine. You don’t have to use as many words as I do (but I do know you can), and your perspective opens up my world, and you are my favourite joke book and you do intenssssssity too.
Writing it in a blog is cheating (not that kind of cheating, but like writing you a letter and then giving it to everyone else first). I may regret this. But if I tell you like this, I’ll be telling me too, and somehow when I write it it makes so much more sense.

Even as I write this I feel stupid, as though I am asking for something that is selfish and needy. Yet I work with people all the time, and tell so many women that we have a responsibility to speak our truth, for without it, our men just don’t know what we need. And I mean that, I know it with certainty. I know that marriages fail because people don’t communicate directly about what they need from each other. And more often than not women are guilty of hiding that instead of making the impossible possible.

In the end it’s not that I need you (to be anything other than exactly who you are) but I want you, and in that I need to lay my head on your chest and talk, and even if all you can manage is the occasional “mmm hmmm” that would be heaven.

That’s it really. The easiest impossible conversation I ever had.