You Are Here

by David Nicholls

If anything she tried too hard, a people-pleaser, though no one ever seemed that pleased.

Once formed, the idea proved unshakeable, the kind of obsessive project that overtakes men in the middle of life, like marathon running or carpentry.

Would she describe him as shy? Not shy, he just wanted to be left alone.

For the moment she felt content, not because she’d spoken but because she’d been listened to.

Was her company a pleasant surprise or was she the party guest who won’t go home? If only there was something humans could do, a system of mutually comprehended sounds and gestures to express thoughts and feelings.

It’s true I do have time and freedom and I love it, sometimes. But the notion that I should be “making the most of it”, travelling the world or out every night, there’s a kind of tyranny in that too, that life has to be full, like your life’s a hole that you have to keep filling, a leaky bucket, and not just fulfilled but seen to be fulfilled.

Michael spoke the most and she thought, not for the first time, that if you wanted to get a man to talk with real emotion, you should ask him about his father.

No one could have called her vain but there was something very attractive about being found attractive, and perhaps attraction was like sound, the slightest whisper bouncing back and forth, amplifying itself in a feedback loop until it became almost unbearable, until someone surely had to say something about all that noise.