#sunday is my rambling day
At the risk of fundamentally compromising my air of authority, make me a cat. Leave a sparse thread of yourself out in the air, dangling in front of my face. Jiggle it, just the slightest amount, and I’ll go for it like it’s the last meal on earth, sprinting for the horizon. Pique my curiosity, make me interested.
I don’t want to be distracted; that’s not what I’m saying. It’s not even really about being engaged. I can have an interesting conversation, be interested in the person I’m having it with, without ever truly perking my ears and having the thought flit across my mind like an errant streaker: “I wonder what her moan sounds like”. Whatever quality it is that spurs that, it’s more ephemeral than either of us would like it to be.
I’d tell you to add a little flair, set yourself out from among the crowd, but affected difference is, if anything, even more tiresome, as it doesn’t speak to a deep well of a person so much as an attempt to render a puddle an ocean with a cheap scarf and a haughty attitude.
That’s unfair, and I’m painfully aware of that fact. The old adage of ‘be yourself’ was always so cruelly barbed, poised to backfire on the anxious, and irrelevant to those without insecurity. Instead, I’d like to amend it. It’s not so much “be yourself”, as knowing, the old temet nosce, that really cultivate curiosity in the most aloof of people.
Because that’s really what I’m interested in. Knowledge, and the exploration of it. Know who you are, and why you do the things you do, and suddenly you’re opening doors left and right, running down a corridor with your arms outstretched, and each one fans out like feathers on wings. To compound my idioms for a moment, if the first step to knowledge is admitting you know nothing at all, imagine how much of yourself you’re barely even aware of.
So pull at that thread, start to unravel yourself, and that’ll be the moment that I’ll try to capture, the one time that I’ll want to step on, put my hand on yours, and pull back in unison.
That this all manifests into physical threads, and physical ropes, is just the sadistic cherries on the masochistic pie.
