You walk through your apartment at night without bothering to turn on the lights. Why should you? You are in familiar territory. But this is the night that you stub your toe on a table, hard. You verbalize to yourself that this jarring, intense pain will subside in sixty seconds. You might even count down to yourself to pass this time more quickly. The next time you get up for a drink in the night, you turn the light on. This is what talking to you feels like.

You go home to visit your parents. It’s relaxing to leave the city and you get a long drive through the suburbs and the country that follows to clear your head. You feel like yourself in your hometown, remembering high school and how simple it was to run around in flip flops kissing boys and singing Bon Jovi songs. You miss this kind of comfort, of feeling at peace with yourself, of knowing who you are and where your roots are. Entering your childhood home, your mom makes a negative comment about your appearance. This is what talking to you feels like.

In your dream you are frustrated. Something awful is happening and you can’t speak. Or, you can speak but everyone is arguing in a foreign language. You want to tell them something simple, the laws of logic or 2+2=4 and they’re debating you in some f-ed up dream logic until you yourself are confused about which way is up. This is what talking to you feels like.

It’s that day in high school when everyone is supposed to show their school spirit by showing up in your team’s colors. You want to be supportive and contribute to a fun environment so you spend time making your outfit. You wear head to toe red and paint cute black stripes on your cheeks. You get to school, and realize that spirit day is next week. This is what talking to you feels like.

You are talking to the dumbest, most annoying person in the world. This is what talking to you feels like.

You worry about your life and whether it’s meaningful, if you’re in the right career, if you should be married by now, if you’ll ever be married, if you’ll ever feel satisfied. You make decisions and people get offended by them. This is your life though, and the decisions aren’t theirs to be offended by. You are moved by their audacity into second guessing the validity of your values. This is what talking to you feels like.

In the future you will understand the things that seem so confusing right now. The perspective of more years and more wisdom and chronological distance will write stories for your brain to understand. You will know that you were good, that you tried your best, made obligatory human errors, and got out while you could. You will clot your wounds with new knowledge and heal them out of sheer will. You will be able to tell yourself that the things that happened in the dark and remain in places that you don’t talk about have made you resilient. You will get up again and take aim at something new. This is what talking to you feels like.