Rachel Rose Withers

My best friend’s boyfriend once remarked that he had never heard two people converse the way she and I do. When Zoe and I are together (or catching up over Facebook chat), we have so much to say that it is almost as if we are talking at—not to mention over—one another, hurtling between topics, tangents, stories, often talking about seemingly different things, but somehow still keeping up. He couldn’t understand how we were also listening to what the other had to say.

I felt almost a perverse sense of pride in his assessment. Though this anecdote may fulfill an exasperating stereotype about how much women love to gab, I like to think that Zoe’s and my conversational skills—the ability to talk and listen at the same time—had merely reached more advanced levels of the kind of interaction humans specialize in. Our conversations may be indecipherable, but they are undeniably human.