I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. The man kept on talking. A lull of words barraged my too tired brain and a cold spring breeze made my body ache as I stood there listening. Kids and friends walked by, some made eye-contact with me, others waved, and still a few gave me a pat on the back. I wanted to grab one of them, any other person would do to get me out of this mess. I sighed and looked at my phone, it was already nine-thirty.

I needed to go home and do homework, and sleep. Unfortunately, I wasn’t making any progress in that direction. I was the helpless victim of a conversation trap. We’ve all been there one time or another, in a place where at least one individual is held hostage by another who simply refuses to stop talking. It should be compared to battery or assault, because it isn’t much different at all. Neither party is overly engaged in the conversation, but the speaker is interested in what THEY have to say, simply because they want to talk, and they need any kind of an audience they can get. You really will do, even if they don’t know you that well.

Because the conversation wasn’t excessively engaging, I considered just walking away, but I’m not rude enough, unless it’s merited, then that’s another story, and I’ll be as rude as I darn well please. Anyways, another sigh and I lifted my phone to my face again and began texting. I didn’t know what I was going to say, or to whom I was going to say it, but I needed to say something mean to someone. Unfortunately, a death threat only provided a moment’s distraction, and even more unfortunately, that text never was returned.

This is noteworthy mostly because this happened to me twice this week. People just kept talking, and I wasn’t happy to have to be listening. I understand that we all need human interaction, and that we all need respect, love and blah blah blah, but I felt like I had been taken advantage of, because I can’t be mean and tell someone, “I really have to pee, like. . . my bladder might burst right here and now, and that would just be awkward for both of us!” It’s also difficult to pass off, “I need to do homework, because I paid thousands of dollars for some jerk to assign it to me so I could pretend to learn something and get a piece of paper that tells people they should pay me more and listen to me.”

Anyways, I thought about fighting back, because as I said before, it’s like being physically accosted, in the negative way. I figured that I could tell the cops that they were the one who attacked me, and figured that I could then be excused from any wrong-doing, because I was just defending myself. Oh well. Bless those people who stole minutes of my life that I’ll never get back again.