After a day.

Earlier tonight I wasn't trying for anything big, I wasn't trying for anything grand, I was trying to tell a short thing - not long at all, it'd have been done in maybe two minutes - and no good, nothing doing. Los Angeles gets mentioned and Los Angeles gets talked about and past trips to Los Angeles are mentioned at the Friday night family gathering before dinner, a time to chat and talk easily. I mention the La Brea Tar Pits, and the La Brea Tar Pits are remembered by other people present, and I start to talk. I try to talk. I'm cut off.

I'd said I'd gone with a friend who wanted to see them since she watched this one episode -

I said my friend had wanted -

I said -

Each time, I got cut off, talked over, people had heard me talking because what I'd said prompted them to say something. The third time it happened, I tried a direct approach, saying "That's not relevant" and trying to get back to the very short anecdote about my friend having had a good time and what the tar pits smelled like. That was it. I'd mentioned she'd seen them on Laverne & Shirley and my pronunciation of the title of the TV show is corrected and all of a sudden there's talk about that show, and it moves onto sports talk, and there's talk about handball on the streets and I didn't know what came next because at that point I walked out of the room.

Stood up, got up, left. Just out of there.

From what I could hear from the next room over where I was flipping through Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit books, nobody noticed I'd left. The conversation just went on. There were three other people in the room so it wasn't as though I was one of ten or twenty. I constituted a big portion of the conversation, at least until I didn't.

Not being able to say something fast hurt. That nobody seemed to notice I'd left was what really stung.