i don't really know what it is that makes me so easy to ignore. i am transparent, i am the wallpaper but i carry highlighters: i am a drawer, three-dimensional but visually useless.

my voice matches the frequency of highways, of crowded buses: the whine of vapid conversation, the incessant buzz of story-sharing--but not stories, anecdotes. little snippets of occurrence, things that are interesting to others because they interest the speaker, and the listener pretends to listen only until it is their turn to shift, and speak.

nobody really listens. they'll protest, "i'm listening! don't be fooled by my glazed face, the way i search the room for anything to be excited about but you, the way i break away in the middle of your sentence, your climax of excitement before your conclusion: i am listening, but anything else is more interesting than what you are attempting to tell me." they look at you, when you say it: that dreaded phrase! "I think..." and their face registers nothing but horror, utter terror in what you are about to inflict upon them: boredom, death! a story that does not center around themselves.

even the kindest listeners lower their eyes when i say it. "oh," they mutter. "how nice."

i lend out pens. i lend out information, of course. "how do you spell manipulative," they whine. "fair-weather friend," i reply. my voice is lost in the drone of their mind, whisking itself away on the wings of its deficit attention span.

i wear a lot of color, you know. blues, reds, greens, my orange hair, my bright yellow shoes. i dance around, sometimes. i pitch my voice higher, higher until i am heard. i wave my arms. i carry flares.

warm colors are the first colors you see, in a painting. first yellows, oranges, then reds, then onward. i try to leap forward, the foreground! i am the front, i am the bright beginning. eyes pass over me, still,
like greens, like blues-
it's like i am here, but never here.

i hope that there is someone who exists who can say, "tell me, really, what do you think?" and not say it while gesturing to themselves. and not say it with a curl in their tongue that trips the sentence back to "because I..."

and when that someone listens, they look you in the eye. they nod, or frown, but they consider what you have said. eyes bright, ears engaged, shoulders forward, neck straight.

i don't even know if i could do it: listen without formulating your response. listen without flaccid face muscles, without the stink of indifference pulling your eyebrows toward the clock. look a storyteller in the eye without twitching.

 
i walked home today, the smell of snow melting
and i figure that god lays out thoughts for you to find, along your walk home,
if he has a spare moment.
it's all he can find time to do, drop little crumbs of reminders
for you to trip against,
causing you to remember why you were ever happy.