Breathless

Have you ever had the experience of having nothing to say? Perhaps you're dining with long lost friends, who you haven't seen in ages? You could bad mouth Trump, which is now a commonplace salutation tantamount to a French woman giving the Platonic kiss on each cheek. But what comes after? Where to begin? It's similar to facing a blank canvas or page. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" are the words Jack Torrance's wife is horrified to find repeated on his typewriter page in The Shining. That's, of course, no default unless you want to let your friends know you're going mad. In medias res means "in the middle of things." It's easy to pick up where you left off, but harder to create a narrative out of the blue. Making conversation is a form of therapy to the extent that the first words spoken are often the most revealing, pointing to the subliminal reason why you have bothered to exhume old faces and memories from the attic anyway.

read "The Great Bonac 10K 1983" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star