The Sound of Silence

When I was a child, I never shut up. My mother and my sister are both quiet, shy, reticent - the kind of people I see as a personal mission to make laugh and/or explode in anger. My father is a natural salesperson - garrulous and rambling, at times, but in the face of the ice-cold silence that greets him around my mother and my sister, he shuts down. I remember that every weekend the family would go out to eat (I suppose, looking back, this was an expense that my parents could ill-afford, but that insured we would always eat one meal a week together) and on the car trip there and back and the entire time we sat down, I talked. It was my DUTY to make sure that there was no quiet. I talked about school, how I was doing, classes I hated, classes I liked, people my family had never met, changes in the landscape, what we were eating, what the news was, what books I was reading, the color of the leaves, how crappy the weather was, or whatever I could think of. There was no topic too insignificant for me to turn into a fifteen minute monologue. Yesterday, with the exception of a four minute phone conversation with the Bearded One and a request for my landlords to shovel the sidewalk, I didn't talk to anyone. The city was quiet, muffled by a recent snowfall, and I didn't feel like I should intrude on that sound - or that lack of sound. It's difficult to reconcile the two different people at different places and times in the world. Am I a chatterbox? Or am I the girl who is happy with my books and my silence? The Bearded One and I have oft been accused of a somewhat solitary existence. We would much rather walk around the lake than attend a social gathering where small talk might be required (at least I would, maybe I shouldn't make such claims for him). But I force myself to attend social gatherings because I like people and I want to be around. But sometimes I want to be around people who were a little less brash, a little less loud, a little less like people. And that's my personal failing. People are people and I should learn to live with them they way that they are with all their little faults. But I will keep my quiet Fridays where I can be with myself and my thoughts with no intrusions.