It’s the light they seek, after all. How could anyone miss it? Everyone wants an a-ha moment of clarity. One that others participate in, all the better. It may have been as an 18 year old hanging out in bars in Jersey that I learned the trade. It may have been in a sixth grade cafeteria when I had no where to sit but knew what to tell the prettiest girl in the class in order to get her to sit by me. I was no wordsmith, don’t get me wrong. It was the spark. It was the gleam, the streetlight leading me deeper and deeper into someone’s ego, watching them drown in serotonin and dopamine as I fed into every detail that they’d love.

I told this talent to a man once. I had made it all the way south to New Orleans telling people that I could read their minds, or channel their dead loved ones, or tell them whether the year they were experiencing was even or odd, the latter I really did have a knack for. I sat at a jazz bar way too loud and dark to see sparks anywhere and an older gentleman sat beside me, offered me a shot and proceeded to rant on and on about seeing alligators earlier in the day and how he wanted to go back tomorrow and wrestle one to prove a point to his cousins who didn’t think that he’d make it in Louisiana swamplands. At the end of the conversation, despite the fact that I hadn’t spoke much, the man told me that I was a great conversationalist and wanted to exchange numbers just to meet again and chat some more, nothing romantic. “Meeting you right now feels special,” he said.

OR SOMETHING OF THE SORT

Despite the naiveté in his voice and the pompousness that had quietly cushioned my travels I felt an urgency to be honest with this man and so I told him, “Look, I connect with everyone. It’s what I do. I connect with people everywhere I go. The only thing special about this conversation is that you compel me to tell you the truth about that. I humor people.”

I imagined him wrestling gators as his face fell blank and I was sure he’d take out the selfishness of my statement on their little leather bodies, close to the ground on a morning bayou further south than I should have ever been. I never tried explaining it to someone again.