An Overheard Conversation

When you live in Asia and suddenly hear people speaking English, it's odd, but it's not really possible to do anything other than listen in. It doesn't matter how interesting or obnoxious or even boring the conversation is. It's a bit like when you go to the doctor's office, and there's an old man with a weeping sore on his leg.

Two women have sat down at the table next to me, two nice enough seeming middle-aged Australian women who drink vodka tonics and smoke narrow cigarettes, and their conversation drowns out everything else.

You don't overhear people showing the best of themselves. They're not on a date or a job interview. They're two old friends, with all the banal shit that implies. They're talking about the lovely hotel they stayed at in Krabi, the impossibility of finding decent boyfriends as middle-aged women in Southeast Asia. And they're using the same phrases again and again, and laughing at their own jokes. And this banality, and the fact that it's been thrust into my earshot, breeds a sudden contempt. Who are these people? And why did they have to sit next to me? Which is completely irrational, never mind the ethics of it, or what it says about my relationship to the human species, or the level of comfort I have with my own place in the world.

Especially since part of the reason I sat at this sidewalk cafe was because it was on a busy corner, and I've always loved sitting there with my notepad, writing asides, making pencil sketches of fans and streetlights, watching the processions of every walk of life, locals and tourists, parents walking their children home from school, elderly street vendors, framed in a lovely sunset.

And I sit back, make their stories up, where they sleep, what they had for lunch that day, the way they look into their bathroom mirrors, the last thing they said to their dead grandparents. The Eurasian guy about my age with the goatee who looks a little like David Duchovny. The transsexual who works behind a makeup counter in a department store in a provincial town. The two blind women who help each other through invisible streets.

In other words, I liked being around other people, but only people in the abstract. People as fixed as butterflies in museum cases. And so I project my own feelings and narratives onto their lives. Which is probably why I rarely write anything nonfictional about people, because it seems impossible to actually realize their stories, to narrow their subjective experience into 1000 words.

Yet the unknowing is something that we rarely admit to ourselves. We go beyond the most superficial interactions, and find how little we understand anything at all about that person we've worked next to for over a year.