Are You Listening?

I find it hard to concentrate on what you are saying because every time you talk, your face goes into its own world and gets so brilliantly animated that I can’t register anything else. I just manage to get the feeling of what you are saying- from how the look first appears in your eyes, and then depending upon what the thing is, how you tilt your neck or flick your eyebrows or just blink your eyes before the thing starts manifesting itself through the muscles of your cheeks and finally reaches your lips and nine out of ten times causes them to break into a smile. All of this happens in one tenth of a second, but I start looking forward to it two seconds before it begins and keep thinking about it for ten seconds after it has passed and so I don’t end up listening to you. Your smile lingers on and turns into confusion and then you look at me for a response.  I don’t know what to say! You smile in some twenty different ways. But my favorite is your patent smile, the one which can be felt on your shoulders if one held you, and which is yours and yours alone. Every time I see it, I think nothing can go wrong with the world as long as someone can smile like that.

So, this smile analysis takes some twenty more seconds and then you ask me if I’m listening to you At All. Of course I’m listening to you! And watching you. And loving everything I see.