the dot spot

Sea Point is full of strange people – lots of old kugels clawing to their glory days of beehives and bright lipstick, Jehovah’s Witnesses handing out pamphlets of hope and happy lambs, toothless bums lying on the grass smelling like shit and booze – that sort of thing.

The other day I walked past a woman that was having a full-on conversation with herself. I watched her walking towards me, lips moving, furrowed brow. I looked for a bluetooth contraption hanging off her ear, thinking that she was perhaps in deep discussion with some significant other, but there was nothing. Just her and her self. As she walked past me, she caught my eye and instead of stopping her conversation kept right on talking to herself.

Ha ha, silly bat, thought I and forgot about it. Until today.

You see, there’s this thing I do — and I’m sure many people do it also — which I like to call dialogueing. It’s when you’re unable to vent the stress of a relationship and instead of actually verbalising your problem to the actual person involved, you imagine possible conversations,  including utterances, rebuttals, subtext and — if you’re really getting into it — expression.

Usually I do this in my head.

Today, walking along the passage to our neat little garden with the red door I found myself in a loaded conversation, full of projected shock and fatalistic endings – perfect, in fact for the likes of a soapie. I was getting really involved with the course of my created revelations when I suddenly stopped. I’d been doing this all out loud.

It’s a problem I think that needs to be addressed. Not the fact that I dialogue, but the fact that I don’t realised I’m doing it out loud.

I wonder now how many times people have walked past me, staring and saying to themselves – silly bat, take your meds.