Can You Hear Me?

Hello readers and wanderers!

If you follow my page consistently, welcome back!

If this is your first time visiting, welcome!

It has been one very long, exhausting week. As you can probably imagine, it feels pretty good to get back into my regular rhythm of writing. While I haven’t shared anything new with you in a while, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working hard to challenge myself. This week, I had one word on my mind: communication. My water polo coach says it all the time, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “Just open your mouth and communicate!” At this point, I bet you’re expecting me to say that it isn’t that easy, right? We’re only human, and communication is the one thing that history has proven we can never get right. We get our words mixed up, and always manage to say the wrong things at the wrong time. However, this is not the case.

This week, I tried something different. I kept a stack of Post-it Notes next to my bed with a pen. Before I went to bed each night, I wrote about communication based on what I saw and witnessed that day. The good, the bad, and the ugly (and trust me there was ugly). 

Afterwords, I took these scribblings and turned them into stanzas.

Enjoy.

-ZCS

Can You Hear Me?

It’s interesting how our lives remain so connected,
when our relationships are so broken.
Technology is improving our communication?
Ha! Give me a break!
We spend our time having conversations via online game rooms and chat rooms,
while the people standing in front of us are slowly dying, slowly wasting away.
Relationships and friendships are two sided–
and today, one side seems to be the flat unwelcoming glass of a cellular device.

We desperately want our words to be profound and meaningful,
but our deepest thoughts and desires never make it past our lips.
Chilled by frigid hearts and forbidding glances,
they will sit there an eternity out of fear to express ourselves.
We dream of describing the perfect moment,
the beauty of the sky, or the way you pull off that dress just right–
but it becomes lost in the tundra of translation,
Our words stilled simply because we try too hard.

Do we even think when our words come out?
We have broken filters, fixed with Scotch Tape, popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners.
Every tiny little thought that passes through our closed minds reaches the tongue
and tumbles out without a chance for reclamation.
No, “tumbles” is the wrong word to describe how we sling such small, shallow thoughts–
The action is vulgar, leaving a bad taste in our mouths as we take aim at the ones we love most.
Our words hit like sledgehammers and maim like bullets,
Crucifying the innocent and beating the abused.

There are very few feelings that are worse than speechlessness.
As humans, we always think we should be expressing ourselves and sharing ideas,
communicating with the world around us in a way that we think will make things better.
Not knowing how to comfort, how to make someone feel your love when they need it most–
it isn’t natural, it isn’t human.
All we can do is pull them into our arms and wipe away their tears.
Words rush through our minds at a hundred miles an hour and none of them feel right.
It has been a long day, my friends.

One of the joys in surrounding yourself with people you love is this:
You don’t have to say anything at all to feel comfortable, safe and relaxed.
You just are.
I could write at lengths about the sciences and studies of body language,
Or you can just think back to the last time you sat down with your mother,
Your father, your brother, your sister, your spouse, or your friends– and just sat.
Nobody needed to say anything, because you were both there and present–
Living life at that single perfect moment, together.
And that is communication.

-ZCS