when we talked

We bookended our conversations with awkward pauses, but what came in between made it all worthwhile. Neither of us knew how to be normal, not really, so when we were in the company of one another, all facades fell away, and we forgot how to smalltalk – a skill we’d both acquired, with varying degrees of success. But every time, something would fall into place between the haphazard attempts at conversation starters, and we would end up talking for ages about Kosovo, or High Renaissance Art, or Mac vs. PC. And then, the connected topics would fray, become less tangible, and we would return once more to our hemming and hawing and eventually, share a half-hearted hug or a stuttered goodbye, the moment lost, with no guarantee of revival.