dial

– Increasingly, my heroes tend to be people who seem to enjoy life or people who manage to eek out a living out of their ordinariness.

I heard this on the telephone. On occasions my telephone nabs a conversation or two out of the blue. I usually hang up the receiver and try to get a normal tone to go about my business. God knows the very first year I tried to do away with the nuisance but the local phone company doesn’t prioritize lesser lines like mine. Five years later I am still waiting for my complaint to be filed. Sort of makes one feel left behind by the internet age. Eitherway, I can say on my behalf that I at least switched to tone dial before skype came to be imagined yet somehow this switch to tone has yet to impress me as the reader can very well attest for itself.

It wouldn’t take me long to figure out whose tíªte-í -tíªte fortune had me eavesdrop. But if a benefit has been derived out of the crossline is that too much interference can be a cause of mental distress the likes that befit that new adage, one needs X like one needs a hole in the head. This small town doesn’t afford the luxury of anonymity. Specially when one knows that said luxury usually tends to arrive in due time, one mustn’t rush, the goods are delivered sooner rather than later.

Am all for privacy, believe me. Yet the forefathers of the right to privacy all lived in big cities. I swear, I am party to all sorts of public displays that would certainly leave a city lover flushed red.

Anyhows, I bring the subject up because I was somehow tempted to continue hearing the conversation but by the time I reacted to my own thoughts my habit of hanging up the phone had beaten me to first base and when I lifted up the earphone and was ready to satisfy curiosity, I got a tone.

Yet the string of the conversation that I nabbed pulsated vibrantly across my ear drums like a tic toc fills the silence at times. It filled a void that lacked words and overhearing the unwelcomed string of thought sort of put things to place. Normally I don’t rush to write down these catharsis, in fact, it took me several years before I could muster the gull to do so now.