To be or not to be

Lawrence Ypil
Dog-ears in the wrong notebook

THERE are two types of people: those who talk aloud to themselves and those who don’t. And it is inconsequential whether this is done in the privacy of one’s rooms or on the street, the public toilet. Or whether this is mere whispering to oneself, audible to the audience of one, or screamed out loud, enough for the people sitting in a restaurant across the street to turn, in the direction of your voice, and then back to their own conversation.

The greater consequence is whether one does so or not. It is a clear and rigid divide: between the talkers-to-the-selves and to the not. Between the audible-thinkers-of-the-world and those who choose to shut their mouths.

One would think that writers would belong to the former, writing being a kind of talking-to-oneself on the page. But it’s because I do most of my talking with a pen and not with my mouth that I hardly if ever find myself thinking out loud, that I find myself irritated when I find myself sitting beside a woman who is talking to a computer screen about the difficulty of opening a website, the screen being a stand-in for herself.

The table on which her laptop is placed being a stand-in for herself. The window, the door of the coffee shop, the wind being a stand-in for herself. The man who sits beside her, myself, becoming a stand-in for herself. Herself being the stand-in for everything, everyone, she wishes to say: why has my file been lost? Why the *&^* is it gone? Why am I so stupid to have erased it? Well, I could answer, but if I did the rest of the afternoon will become a messy business.

I almost mutter to myself. Because I dare not interrupt her rant, I am tempted to speak to myself, talk to myself out loud, tell myself: you have no right to be angry with this woman, Larry, so mind your business and get back to whatever it is you are writing, because this woman has the right, every right, to talk to herself out loud in a public place if she wants to, needs to, and it is not your place to temper her instincts, intrude her thoughts-turned-into-speech, ruin her day, and invite her ire.

And you will not, ever, win a match with this woman if a verbal spar were to ensue. She will cream you, decimate you, leave you speechless. You will not have anything to say to anything she will say to you. It will be embarrassing. You will want to hide. You will want to leave this coffee shop and go home thinking “people who talk to themselves out loud are the worst kind of people,” but because you will not want to be one of them, not want to contradict yourself by becoming that which you purport to hate, you will write instead.

But I don’t. Besides, it will be difficult to tell if I am talking to her or I am talking to myself if I do so. It will be a messy affair, and I will be the kind of thing I will be embarrassed to write about, even to myself.