Self-interview, huh? How often do you talk to yourself?
Kind of a lot, actually. I’m an only child who’s never had any kind of a roommate, so I got used to getting away with it. Besides, it comes in handy on public transit. I apparently have one of those faces that says: Talk to me. Confess. Strangers sit next to me on buses and start telling their life stories. There’s something overwhelming about being that approachable, and on days when I feel like I don’t have enough to offer in return, which is most days, I ride the bus holding a book and wearing headphones, but sometimes that doesn’t work. I rode into Chicago once with a teenage runaway who had told me all about her boyfriend troubles by the time we arrived, and out of Chicago once with a man who’d just gotten out of jail and needed to talk about it. I ran into a woman I’d never met before in a hotel lobby and she began telling me about the measures she was taking to escape an abusive marriage. A man on a bus in Missouri once sniffed me, and somehow got from inquiring about my perfume as a potential gift for his wife to telling me about the problems in his marriage. Three bus drivers in three different states have proposed to me. Once, I was hungover and limping across an Iowa City parking lot because I’d twisted my ankle the night before, and a man came running over and said I looked like a writer and maybe I could help him, and handed me a cassette tape he said contained government secrets. On my second day in Paris, people came up to ask me for directions in several languages that I didn’t speak. Years ago, in an Amtrak snack car, I sat with some guys who, apropos of nothing, asked me if I thought they’d be extradited from the state they were visiting in order to face drug charges in the state we’d just left. Last week I was standing at the bus stop with about ten people, and a woman walking by ignored all ten other people and stopped and stood in front of me and kept talking until I took my headphones out. She asked me if I was ready to have my palm read, and when I said no, gave me her address and told me she’d be there when I was ready. I’m hoping this is the beginning of a narrative arc that leads to me being told I have superpowers, preferably the zappy lightning bolt kind.