The benefits of friends

It has been years since I could talk with a friend without fear of recrimination or even interruption. I had forgotten how nice it is to just get together and spend time talking. I have often been called a guy who is all talk, and for a while that was just not the case, I was a man without much talk in my life. In fact, in many ways, I chose to remain silent, to be talkless as it were. Sometimes it is healthy to not spend a lot of time talking, to remove yourself from the conversation and just listen and watch.

Yesterday I made the decision to call a fairly new friend and get together just to talk, no other agenda. Talk is what we did. Sure it started simply, as it should. Keep it peaceful so neither one of us gets hurt. There were a couple of glasses on the table. A candle burning and some sort of perfume in the air. After an hour or so of talking one of use decided that it would be OK to put more effort into the communication. Talking turned to heated debate which quickly turned to almost arguing, but how long can one really argue passionately with a friend?

Soon enough we shared a glass of wine and we were quietly talking. Again, this peaceful, slow talk that is important and brings about a sense of calm. Though in our friendship, the passion can arise out of the blue, one moment we are quietly talking, the next, almost screaming and soon after, a whisper.

So it went till early this morning. All that talk had taken its toll on my brain and my body. During the long hours of almost constant talking even my body was feeling the effects and I found myself shifting to more comfortable positions, contorting myself after hours of talk, so I could remain comfortable while still talking away, always talking.

Now the nice thing about my friend is we are on the same wavelength when it comes to these sorts of marathon talk sessions. We both enter knowing that the bottle of wine would be finished about the same time we were. There we were, right around 3 AM, almost completely talked out, with just one glass of wine for us to share.

Just when I was going to admit that I had not spent a night talking like this in almost a decade and that this was the sort of conversation people only dream about or see in movies, we began a new conservation, this one laced with metaphor and innuendo. All of a sudden, what had been a night of wild conversation mixed with cerebral moments of extreme calm, had become a storm of word play the likes of which I may have been completely unprepared for. This is the sort of deep conversation that leaves you sore for days, mentally sore, I think.

I sipped the last glass of wine and shared it with my beneficial friend. We smiled. So much talk, I believe for both of us, had left our lips tired, sore and puffy. We would need rest, but the conversation was so enticing, the communication so filled with passion and respect, neither could break away, even for an instant.

I dragged myself home early this morning, intellectually spent after a night of talk, endless, wild, seductive and creative talk. Nothing off limits will leave you like that, tired, whirling and exhausted in the best way possible.