A Conversation that Echoed Back

Not long ago, I received a text from someone I hadn’t heard from in years. The message was simple, almost casual, as if he were just checking the weather of my life: How are you? How’s everything? After all that time, it seemed to carry some weight, so I suggested we talk on the phone. We set a time, and he called.

I greeted him warmly: “It’s good to hear your voice. What’s up?” But it became clear very quickly that nothing, in fact, was “up.” He had reached out, but he had no story to tell, no question to ask, no curiosity to follow. The conversation fell into my hands like something fragile and unfinished.

So I began to fill in the gaps—my life lately, the things I’ve been doing, the memories we once shared. I asked about his family and about people we once knew together. I even tried reviving old moments that had made us laugh. But he didn’t remember any of them.

There was a strange hollowness in the call, like talking to someone through a long hallway. Eventually I said, gently, that I didn’t want to take up too much of his time. That’s when he said, “Yes, you do talk a lot.” I hung up, and a question curled its way into my mind: Do I? Is that a flaw?

Later, while revisiting passages from Night Train to Lisbon, I came across a line that struck me with unusual force:

"When we talk about ourselves, about others, or simply about things, we want—it could be said—to reveal ourselves in our words: We want to show what we think and feel. We let others have a glimpse into our soul.”
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That is exactly how I feel when I speak with people. I reveal myself. I offer something true, something inward, something thoughtful. I invite connection.

Yet not everyone wants to reveal themselves. Many people stay safely on the surface: what happened today, what they saw on the news, a movie, an errand. These are the outer layers, easy to talk about, harmless, unthreatening. But deeper questions—Who are you really? What do you want? What do you fear?—feel dangerous to them. Some avoid those inner spaces because they hold trauma. Others simply never learned the language of self-reflection. And some prefer to leave the soul unnamed.

For me, the more puzzling question is whether people feel unheard because I “talk too much.” That phone call made me wonder. But when I look back honestly, I gave him all the space in the world. He simply didn’t step into it. Perhaps he couldn’t.

The truth is, I speak from a life that has been deeply lived—through literature, memory, inner exploration, Pessoa, Jung, symbolism, dreams, the shifting landscapes of Lisbon and Mexico, the ocean, the patterns of fate. I live with a mind that never stops turning over the meaning of things. Not everyone does. Not everyone can meet a conversation at that depth.

So I’m learning something: It’s not that I talk too much. It’s that I talk from a place that not everyone knows how to reach.

Still, I want to be mindful, to listen closely, to notice who asks questions back and who reveals even a small piece of themselves. But I won’t shrink the parts of me that reflect and remember and speak from the soul. That is who I am.
And maybe that is the season I’m claiming now—a season of speaking honestly, listening generously, and recognizing when a door remains closed not because I knocked too hard, but because the room behind it was never meant for me to enter.
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These are paintings by the renowned Portuguese painter Antonio Costa Pinheiro from his series honoring the work of Fernando Pessoa 1983 and Landscape of his Atalier 1984. Both very connected to their interior selves.