The Stations of Kay Theresa

She used to joke she’d become immune

To human-interaction toxin

Through a microdosing regimen—

Tiny conversations with strangers,

More than hello, less than a minute,

That’s the way you do it. Tolerance!

At the last stop on her long road up

To where her thoughts could let their hair down,

She encountered two men with a boat

They were easing into the water,

And another old man watching them

From a ledge above the shore, silent.

The two men with the boat were talking, cheerful,

And had a couple of fishing poles.

Leave them alone, she thought. The third man,

The silent one, seemed more interesting,

But the problem with the taciturn

Is they’re often secretly lonely

And, once invited to talk, can’t stop.

She eyed him, and then she recognized

In his weird, half-inward expression,

A loner beyond the final stage

Of social detoxification.

He was hanging up there at the top

Of the long road climbing the mountain

For the same exact reason she was,

But he was beyond the wish to talk.

He just had to listen a little

To wind-blown scraps of conversation,

And that was enough to steady him.

She turned her face to the open lake,

Then nodded when she turned back to him,

Careful not to call out a greeting.

She was rewarded with a curt nod

And the actual ghost of a grin.

My most successful relationship,

She would relate cheerfully, later,

Undisturbed by murmuring voices,

With my favorite fellow human.