Maybe, as we get older,
we begin to hunger
for words.
For a while,
it felt like I had been thinking only inside the computer.
So for the first time in a while,
I shook myself free,
and for the first time in a while,
I drove the car that had been sitting only in the underground parking garage
out into the open.
To a very plausible cafe on the outskirts-
in one corner of it.
It was usually crowded even on weekdays,
but thankfully today there was no one there.
I was organizing some old scraps of notes,
papers I could not even remember when I had written,
when suddenly
I began to hear low voices coming from outside.
A little later,
with a glance,
four or five middle-aged, no, older,
gentlemen and ladies took their seats and began chatting.
How much time passed?
I do not know whether I had finished my own personal scribbling,
or whether I had simply reacted unconsciously to their conversation...
Just before they all stood up,
they were speaking about someone older than they were.
When that elderly person walked through the door, the middle door, the hallway,
closed the bedroom door,
and lay down to sleep,
a sudden fear would come over him, they said.
They had already installed an emergency call bell,
but when something truly urgent happened,
how could he press it in time?
One scattered story led to another,
about how someone had been washing dishes when the old man came over and talked endlessly beside them.
The husband would stand at a distance, clearing his throat over and over as if to signal something,
but the daughter-in-law said that, in the end, she simply felt sorry for him.
'
He must have been so hungry for words.
That sentence was the last one.
And in that quiet, peaceful cafe,
the atmosphere inside
suddenly turned into silence.
And I, too,
closing the moment awkwardly by saying
that it always seemed like I was the one talking too much,
watched everyone rise in a hurry.
...
Maybe that is why
I am also speaking like this,
in my own way.
Ah, I am full.
