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A Little Less Conversation

'Awkward silences' are something that I have grown increasingly conscious off over the past two fewyears. You are in a conversation with one or more friends at one moment and suddenly nobody has anything to say. What follows is the extension of time, when every second feels longer than it is supposed to last. The unease is mutual and everybody knows the other person feels it too. Handphones come out, messages are checked, until someone breaks the silence with a new topic.

I have tried to find explanations to this phenomenon, that for some reason I do not remember experiencing before university. Was it due to a lack of openess, where the audience felt obliged to clutch onto their own private thoughts and not share it with anyone else, lest it tarnish their image? Was it due to the growing inability to ask questions about the other, perhaps as a result of a lack of interest in the lives of others? Or was it because we think we know everything there is to know from the person's Facebook profile (which he updates regularly) that there is really nothing to ask? I did not kmow.

And then I went to India. 

After 4 long years during which I had very much forgotten the mannerisms of Indian society, I was thrown into a group of boys about my age. After a while, I started to wish they would just stop talking. 

In the conversations there, pauses rarely made an appearance. Everyone seemed to have something to say about everything. There was a high degree of openness, along with a greater degree of exagerration (I use the word 'exagerration' as an euphemism). It felt like a competition to talk, with the only discomfort during the conversation being me having to wait for you to stop talking so I could say something even cooler. It was a race to see who had the best stories that brought about the most awe. Very plainly, you could see that people here knew a a lot of things and a lot of people, and most importantly, had no disinclination to sharing that information.

Admist this 'noise', my cousin asked me, "Why are you so quiet?".

I don't know.
Perhaps I missed the silence
with all her awkwardness.


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