I really don’t understand how boys think. I’m sitting here, talking to my friend about her guy friends, her past love interests, these guys that were only weeks ago pledging their undying love, saying words that would make anyone’s heart melt, and are now being unnecessarily mysterious, and it makes no sense. I consider myself pretty adept in figuring things out, divulging the true meanings in the understated, in the silences between the talking, consider myself to be pretty intuitive, and I sit here and listen to her and nothing makes sense. Screw John Gray and his “Mars & Venus” hypotheses, screw over-analysis, I need a boy-to-girl dictionary, complete with an appendix of overused phrases that say one thing but mean another. If they can make a device to interpret what a dog means by his barks, surely they can make a device that will interpret guys’ silence, their coded, vague messages, their true intentions. It shouldn’t be this hard, don’t you think?

But it is. It seems that nobody says what they mean, nor do they mean what they say, any more. Instead of saying “I miss you”, we say “How are things?” Instead of answering that we’re laying awake, wondering what they’re thinking of while they’re no longer in our bed, wrapped around us, keeping us warm while we listen to the sound of the mid-evening noise, safe and protected and for once feeling like everything was right in the world, and knowing that we’ll be waking up to his smile and the normalcy and for once, not over-analyzing something, anything, we say “Work is Good.” We want to know if you miss us. We want to tell you everything. We want to just erupt with feeling, with emotion, pouring out our vulnerability and putting it all on the table, but instead we talk about painting our houses, about the mundane, trite matters that are the epitome of small talk. And we push our true feelings, our true questions, our true thoughts back down into our safe place where nothing gets said and no one gets hurt. Nothing risked, nothing gained.

Instead, we sit on IM and talk to our dear friends about it, trying to get their insight on why he hasn’t called, how to phrase this email, how to interpret the small talk and the fact that you both know that you’re ignoring the elephant in the room. We look to them for the assurance that we’re being denied by dodging the question, by asking or saying anything but what we want to say to you. We find meaning in songs, in words, in the sympathy of others. Because somehow, it makes it a bit easier to face if we at least tell our friends what we can’t tell you, that we want things to be back the way they were, that we want to try to make it work despite any obstacle that is in our way, and that we miss you tremendously.

So we listen to our songs, and take solace in the words of others, while we push our words away.

“You Know So Well” – Sondre Lerche

Use every chance you’ve been given,
She replied, after several days.
It’s no good to be perfect,
You know so well,
Things are easy to tell.

There is one thing I know,
It goes like this,
It’s that when I lose my sleep,
it’s you I miss.

I have told you this before
and my transparent mind
won’t cover see-through hearts
I’ll be straight with you now
Now I’m not what you want
just like the rest
and you feel like you’re subject to a test
But if there’s one thing I know it’s this
When I lose my sleep it’s you I miss

You sleep all night
you know you lie awake
Tell me, yeah
And time is running out
and you know so well
it may never be