No Talking - Rebecca Own

Aaron just kept talking. And talking. I hadn’t seen him since New Year’s Eve 2001, when I slept with him. He talked incessantly then, too, but I was so drunk I didn’t care. Aaron is hot; I wanted sex. We reunited last weekend at an Ethiopian restaurant in Berkeley with two other friends from our UC Santa Cruz days, Anna and Jon. Anna was so excited to see Aaron. I wonder if she was disappointed. He never asked about their wedding, or the house they bought, or Anna’s 3 years at College of Marin to prep herself for medical school at age 32, or her mother, or her 3 sisters, or her reprobate brother. He talked about the shifts he works at the ER as a nurse, his father’s home remodeling- interjecting a lengthy diatribe about how, when, and why he moved from his apartment in the inner Richmond and the subsequent fate of the other roommate, i.e., he had to moved out too. It was just talk as if no one was there; as if conversation wasn’t meant to be threads weaving people together in acknowledgment or commonality. It was just words. Many words.