Chatter
The sound of her voice is what you're doing with cheese: grating. What you're doing to your little sister: annoying. What breasts are to men: fascinating. She is talking, talking much louder than the music, talking still through the performance, an acoustic performance of a husky-voiced singer in the coffeeshop.

She seems excited about something, waving her hands animatedly, but I just want her to shut the hell up. She blabbers on, laughing once in awhile. Maybe she is studying with her friend. Maybe they are talking about a boy. That's fine -- I've studied and talked about boys before. What I don't understand is the volume of her voice, the way she drags out her vowels, like "I knooooooooooooow," and the pitch of her voice, like "You want me to read how much?!" the latter in italics, question mark, exclamation point.

I wonder if I've ever been this girl. If I sat somewhere, with my tightly-pulled back hair (blonde), slight overbite, with a black puffy vest and nondescript black shoulder bag alter-ego self, blithely ignorant that someone was wishing me death -- if not death, then at least a solid helping of shut the hell up.

If I were an anthropologist studying this distant and foreign culture that the girl is a part of, and I had to annotate her language phonetically, it would read something like this: "Ow my gad, aand haw is that ekzawckly ... ow, toe'lly, toe'lly, yah. Iwazlayk, owthank Gaad, he waz preyaktlythaz byag and I gat his nambar ... toe'lly, toe'lly, rayt, rayt, toe'lly ... yah, toe'lly." The number of times "totally" uttered in five minutes: fifty. "Yeah," around twenty. Strangely, "like," only once.

Logic and common sense tells me: If this girl is so bothersome, you should move or leave. The thing is, I am now inexplicably attracted to this girl. Not attracted, like I find her pleasant and enjoy her company, but attracted in the way moths are to a flame.

Why do moths hover around heat until they are, literally, consumed by it? Are they intrigued by the strange, flickering movement? Are they, too, annoyed by it, and believe the feeble flap of their wings are strong enough to fan out the fire?