Reimagining

The love language of one of my closest friends is attention.

Imagine that I describe to him a problem. He listens to my verbose speech carefully, spends what seems like an unusually prolonged amount of time reflecting on it, and eventually breaks into a monologue that (mostly) slices through my fog.

It is hard to explain what is different about this compared to other conversations because the most palpable differences exist between moment and moment. Even if there is no resolution to be reached, the attention that underpins the conversation stands in sharp contrast to advice generated against our mental databases of common knowledge. And when he can choose between pace and pause, he chooses the latter.

I’m partly fascinated by attention because my own is awful. I flit between thought to thought, a moth thirsty for light.

I imagine attention as treasure, love as a nail, myself as a withering leaf, the person before me desperately trying to make conversation as a head morphing into a lightbulb and by the end of this sentence I will have found some metaphors and lost the treasure.

But the metaphor, I’d like to think, is also a form of prolonged consideration. In an age of brevity, is it not a privilege to be described through something roundabout? (In an age of brevity, in an age of economic language, in an age of meeting minutes in an age of unpunctuated texts IAAO acronyms even repetition is a form of slow consideration).

I imagine the metaphor as a taxi. The one about love as a nail, for example, starts in the middle of nowhere, as if no thought underlies it. But if I begin to explain it, I think you will feel like you are going somewhere. At the end of the metaphor you will feel like you have arrived at some meaning, forced or otherwise. When I reimagine you as a head morphing into a lightbulb, I am trying to make meaning out of you in more ways than one in the age of brevity. I’m trying to think of you longer.

Like I was saying, the love language of one of my closest friends is attention.