Par Lerr Daze Chooses

circa
It's weird that people talk. We contort our mouths and make noises at each other, assuming they mean something to the other person we're noising at.

Even if we don't speak the same language as the other person, both of us still talk, just maybe not to each other. The most primal space in our cognition says, "These noises are silly." And, suddenly, language is stripped of its implied meaning and goes back to being noise from a contorted mouth, doing an interpretive dance on a sincerely helpless face.

If you take a mental step behind even the implied meaning of the sounds you can gut everything someone says to you, leaving the words empty and benign. You'll look back on conversations and see how ridiculous it was to get upset during an argument, or sad during a story, or heartbroken during a breakup.

Just because you're self-aware, though, doesn't excuse you from having feelings. It just means your thoughts can go from, "That was really mean," to "Those mouth noises are making me upset. I will noise back at this person with a vengeance."

The voice in your head that's been reading this to you isn't a voice, at all. It's a series of trained synapses emulating noises you've been internalizing your whole life. Isn't it strange to think that, if a person who didn't understand the language you speak could read your mind, your thoughts would just be a jumbled mess of sounds?

What you've been reading has no inherent sound by itself, either. You've been taught how to convert these symbols into comprehensible noises, either in your head if you're reading silently, or through your mouth if you're reading aloud. Either way, it's all talk.

It's weird that people talk.

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