Family Dinner

I hate when the mix of dinner crowd forces me in the middle of a group full of loud personalities, taking up the conversation with their empty, echoing words. They fill up the chairs with their bodies and the conversation with their bellowing, and those of us small in both voice and stature are left to sit quietly by, spooning rice into our mouths and wishing we were anywhere else.

It's not that I don't have input. It's just my words seem to emerge from my mouth, a few octaves lower than I intend, and escape into the battlefield that is the colliding sound waves above the dinner table. Mine are small, feeble warriors and quickly surrender to the pulsing sounds reverberating around the plastic cups of Mountain Dew and Diet Pepsi. Frustrated, I just sit there, replacing the words on the tip of my tongue with the bland food that people seem to think defines my personality.

I am so close to the people next to me that we can hardly eat without our elbows hitting; we are so close I think they might be able to hear my thoughts, tearing each new loudmouth comment apart for its ignorance and depravity, but it's really just envy because people are looking at them when they speak and responding, and that's all I really want. But I know my neighbors can't hear what is happening in my brain because they don't even hear what I choose to vocalize.

I know it isn't true. I know that some personalities are always going to win out, claiming the entire market, making it seem as if they have the only personality worth having. The only way to be. Social, exhaustively happy. I know that I'm as valid as them, as interesting as them, as important. But somehow that certainty just isn't enough to make that hour bearable; I just wait.

I wait until I can pour all the bottled up thoughts onto a page, onto a screen. Sustained by an eternally captive audience, I can release what nobody else cares to take from me. Perhaps I don't have a voice in a crowd so I have the words necessary to move my pen across the page. Maybe I'm meant to be reclusive, and I'm just fighting my nature to no avail. Maybe my dinnertime companions are unwittingly providing me with a livelihood, a reason to live.

Cautiously optimistic, I must accept my fate. Channel Salinger. Write because it's so hard to talk, and maybe one day, they will be sad they never listened, and finally read.