Pour This Heart Out

I've been pouring my heart out to strangers.

It's the weirdest thing, this concept of "chatting" with men online--people you barely know, people who at first seem interesting and cute, and who may indeed be those things, but who come with their own issues and baggage, despite their intellects and/or ability at taking sexy pictures of themselves.

One man I've been chatting with--who really had a sexy pic of himself in nice underwear and turned out to be smart, inexplicably--said that it's easy to do when you don't know really know someone. And yet by that point we were trading multi-paragraph emails, which I think means that I do actually know him in some way. I am good at sussing out someone's character from the tiniest slivers of information. This guy is smart, accomplished, and yet there's definitely a wall, a sense of removal; we can trade any words across the ether or wires and somehow that communication may not have the weight I think it does.

Not that it matters, really, because what role does his opinion play in the decisions I make? And yet three different men have told me eerily similar things in the last 10 days: "You're a born communicator"; "Clearly you're meant to do something with a higher purpose"; "You're a dreamer"; "You're clearly extremely smart."

Sure, I like hearing it. I don't know if I believe all of it, despite the existence of this blog, yet I find it weird how consistently phrases pop out, nearly word for word.

But I feel, again, like I am on the verge of something. Whether it's brought on by the new year, the itch I feel every day in front of my computer, the need I feel to untangle words, to tell the truth--plain and simple.

Chatting is supposed to be escapist and yet it's not. I can't be that kind of person, I realize, who trades in intellect for cheap interaction. Even casual conversations involve words most people don't use. I can't censor myself. I am not embarrassed about it. I wouldn't change it, either. But sometimes I wish I could stop myself from revealing what seems like a bit too much. And yet, if people respond with real questions and comments, they aren't just humoring me, right? After all, few people ever learn how to "communicate cleanly," as I like to call it. Besides, no one can ever fault you for telling the truth of how you feel. It hardly matters if it's a man with nice underwear online or an old friend. If you ask, I will tell you.