coming around again

I have seen it in myself, I have seen it in my friends, I have even seen it in the likes of the famous and brilliant. Sometimes we repeat ourselves. We crack the same joke, we tell the same story, we confide the same deep dark secret, or make the same comment, often in the exact same words.

Perhaps it is that we run out of material after a while. Perhaps we like to revisit our classics, our personal greatest hits. Perhaps there are things weighing and preying on the mind. They get turned over, poked, and prodded. Not altering in shape or quality, they linger.

And those around us allow yet another retelling with a polite smile and some recreated version of their earlier response or respond with a brisk interruption to inform us of our redundancy of information. I don't know which response is better. One involves a polite deceit a blending of artifice and consideration. The other involves stopping your train of thought. It could pull the rug out from under you. It is a matter of what aspect of the interaction is more important: the content of the information being relayed or the tenor and color of the interchange.

At a given moment what matters more the word or the sound of the word?

I think of a passaage from a story about lovers parted and reunited and how the girl confides that she makes a point of laughing at all the same stupid jokes that he tells over and over as loud as she can. Because it is a comfort to hear it again. Because she is glad to have that back in her life. From happiness at being again with the one she loves.

"I know nothing says the same, but if you're willing to play the game, it's coming around again."
-Carly Simon