Minds come in all
shapes and sizes.

I have a friend that I occasionally can’t understand at all, sometimes for minutes at a time, while she speaks in English, and with perfect diction. She is self-acknowledgedly neuro-divergent, and so am I. And, our neuro-divergences are not especially compatible. It’s nobody’s fault. Our minds just have very different slants.

My slant:

If someone uses an unassigned pronoun or leaves a participle dangling, my mind seizes on it and I struggle to intake additional information at all until the unclear statement has been sorted out. I can do it. I can keep listening, but every sentence further carries the anxiety of spinning grandma’s finest china on very tall sticks.

Her slant:

Poetry is greater than prose. Meaning is fluid and should be arrived at through a succession of near miss fly-overs that fully paint the terrain with broad strokes of metaphor and wordplay — if meaning should be arrived at at all.

I sometimes talk to her for hours.

Because she has thoughts that I can’t.