Fragments of the Quiet Mind

I’ve never been good at it. Small talk. Idle words traded like pocket change, meant to buy just enough silence to keep us from slipping into something too real. “How’s your day?” “Busy.” “Weather’s been weird lately.” “Yeah, climate change or something.” No one means anything they say. Not really. And yet we say it anyway, like incantations to ward off the ghosts of intimacy. I find myself participating out of habit. Not because I enjoy it, but because I don’t know how not to. Because answering “How are you?” with “I don’t know, I haven’t felt like myself in months” is too much honesty for a hallway or a checkout line. But what is small talk, really? A dance? A mask? A form of mercy? Maybe it’s all three. We’ve been trained to speak without saying, to connect without touching. Politeness as performance. Distance as default. We ask about the commute, not the chaos. We mention the new restaurant, not the quiet ache in our chest that hasn’t left since December. Sometime...