Most of us will use questions as a means of communication, to form bonds and understanding. To gain some clarity. Deepen relationships. A few will also use them to wound - to probe right into the marrow of who you are just for entertainment, often in public. Though at least those people are normally so obvious as to be avoided. What's harder to avoid in the murky realms of the question labyrinth are the equally loaded, just as hurtful, but deliberately unasked questions. The ones that everyone else is asked and you never are. Always missed off at the end, as though whatever your response might be is wrong, or uninteresting, or worse still, that you have no right to the space your answer implies you take up in the world.
We are told that we need to find our voices, to raise them until they are heard. That it is our responsibility to make sure they are heard by the "right" people. How do you make yourself heard in a vacuum of someone else's creation? How do you contribute to the conversation when those you need to hear you most cut you off at the knees?
When they leave the air hanging heavy with the inference that no one cares enough to hear you speak?
I have often been silenced like this. I have had so many variations of "You are too much" thrown at me that I haven't collected enough words over thirty one years and thousands of books to recount them all for you.
I see him looking at me often. He knows I skate across the uppermost surface of my life with him. He can see the discomfiture at doing so in my slightly bowed head, in the way I still can't stop myself turning slightly to one side, so I can look anywhere but directly at him.
As a child I wasn't allowed to get away with colouring outside the lines. I'd have to start again. Stiffly reproached from underneath knitted eyebrows and flared nostrils. The unasked "why are you like this" - the face set in such a way even a four-year-old knows not to try and answer the question hanging like a storm cloud.
My true answers would be simple. They would take barely a minute of his time to listen. But he prefers these tidy impressions of a life half-lived. One that still fits within his narrow confines of acceptable.
But with or without your questions that matter to me, here I am. Frayed at the edges. Colourful.
Loud. Loved in spite of you.