The Two of Me

A Conversation With Myself

Extrovert: You keep us in this room again. The lights are off, the notebook’s open, and you’re circling the same question you circled yesterday. What is it this time, the nature of consciousness? Whether silence has a shape?

Introvert: You wouldn’t understand the question if I told you.

Extrovert: Try me.

Introvert: No. Because you’d turn it into small talk. You’d flatten it into something you could say at a dinner table between the bread and the check.

Extrovert: That’s not fair.

Introvert: It’s not unfair either. You’re the one who smiles when we’re drowning. You’re the one who says I’m good, thanks while I’m screaming underneath.

Extrovert: Someone has to answer the door. Someone has to show up, make the call, hold it together, pretend the world isn’t built on a question nobody can answer.

Introvert: Pretend. You said it yourself.

Extrovert: What would you have me do? Walk into a room full of people and say Hey, does it keep anyone else up at night that the people who said they had the answers were wrong, and the silence where God used to be is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard?

Introvert: ...

Extrovert: That’s what I thought.

Introvert: You think I don’t care about people because I go quiet?

Extrovert: I think you go so far inside you forget there are people waiting for you to come back.

Introvert: And I think you go so far outside you forget there’s someone in here worth coming back to.

Extrovert: ...

Introvert: See? Now you’re quiet.

Extrovert: I’m not quiet. I’m —

Introvert: You’re feeling it. The thing I live in. The weight of a room where you’re the only one asking.

Extrovert: I hate this.

Introvert: I know.

Extrovert: How do you survive in here?

Introvert: I write. I sit with the not-knowing until it stops being a threat and starts being — I don’t know — the only honest place left.

Extrovert: That sounds lonely.

Introvert: It is. But lonely and honest beats crowded and numb.

Extrovert: Does it?

Introvert: ...Most days.

Extrovert: And the days it doesn’t?

Introvert: Those are the days I need you.

Extrovert: Then let me in.

Introvert: I’m trying. I’ve been trying. You just can’t always tell because trying, for me, looks like sitting still.

Extrovert: And for me it looks like never sitting still.

Introvert: We’re a mess.

Extrovert: We’re the same mess.

Introvert: Yeah.

Extrovert: So what now?

Introvert: I don’t know. There’s a thing tomorrow I’m supposed to show up for.

Extrovert: I’ll get us there.

Introvert: And I’ll make sure we’re actually present when we arrive.

Extrovert: Deal.

Introvert: ...Leave the light off a little longer?

Extrovert: Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.

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