“I love your reactions. They’re so -”
Interrupting, correcting: “ – you know it’s all a performance, right?”
“ – yeah, I know,” satisfied and pleased, “but you’re always so flabbergasted.”*

 

But at heart, I am a basically unresponsive person. When I’m with other people, I’ll catch myself consciously arranging my face into the correct expressions: a lift of the mouth here, a narrowing of the eyes there, and a general tilt of the head – though I don’t do it very well. Too often I think I’ve slipped up somewhere and that the person I’m talking to can see, peering out from between the cracks, the wary, unmoved quiet. I try to be natural, but sometimes I’ll see doubt and offence clouding their eyes. I’ll try to lessen the insult, to let them know it’s not personal, but I’ll get stuck in between opening my mouth and lifting my tongue and I end up looking away.

Yes, largely untouched and fundamentally indifferent.

 

The other day I nearly got run over.

tulips in Yorkville

I was wandering through the Village and its prissiness, thinking about I forget what. Quiet streets branch off from Yorkville Avenue. There are these sudden moments of calm just steps away from Bay Street and its hordes of high-stepping, stiff-necked business people. It’s a very genteel sort of serenity, carefully maintained by hotel workers in pressed trousers and starched shirts, softly cooed over by women swinging deep pink shopping bags and men with sleek machinery hanging off their keys.
I was crossing one of those slender side streets, when a black SUV came careening by, whipping around the corner and past my obliviousness. A step, two steps more and I would have been directly in its path and it was going too fast, cutting the corner too sharply for the outcome to have been anything like good.

But the truck was gone before I’d had time to go through the motions of shock, so I mentally shrugged it off and kept walking (I hadn’t even stopped) to the other side, where a woman and her daughter stood.

I met the woman’s eyes almost by accident and realising that her dropped jaw probably had to do with me, I tried, for her benefit, to look surprised and mustered up a raised eyebrow or two.

And I would have kept walking, but when I reached the curb, the woman gasped, “Was that a close call or what?”

Her daughter, about thirteen maybe, with the pointy knees and shy smile of awkward adolescence, stood silent at her side, just behind the mother’s flailing arms. And this woman, short-breathed and wide-eyed, kept talking, so to humour her, I smiled and said “yes.” And we had a discussion about cats and their lives and I, surprised at her surprise, forgot how many lives cats have, how many I had left. After some vague and mixed up metaphors on my part and outrage and relief on hers, I said goodbye and thankyou and walked away.

 

It seems like such a waste of emotion, to smile when there’s no one to see it, to step back when the danger’s already passed. It’s about trees falling.

 

* But do I love the performances. I love playing along, putting on a good show with someone who knows how to put on good shows: the fencing, the laughing, the unspoken understandings.
I just need an audience to justify the motions.