"You know what? I've been thinking about something that happened to me recently. You know, sometimes you travel to other countries, you meet people in remote locations, you feel close to them for a couple of weeks as if you'd known them forever. Those people you happened to meet at the same geographic point and at the very same moment are not strangers to you anymore, because whatever it was you shared something with them and vice versa. Anyway, you come back home. You find out that some people who'd been your friends for six or seven years have decided to stop talking to you from one day to another. All of them for stupid reasons. That obviously makes you feel confused and all. Then, a couple of months later, you go online and you find yourself seeing other people's social network profiles. You see what they post, what they like, you get an idea of the kind of people they could be. Sometimes, you even fall in love with the idea of that person: "I like what he posts, I like what he likes. I like him", you figure. Then, one day, you're listening to Phillip Glass and writing on your blog at a café. You make a pause to light up a cigarrette and as you exhale the smoke a man sits near you. You've no clue how old he is, what he looks like, what he's doing there. He's just sitting there next to you. You look out of the corner of his eye and continue to smoke. "I guess it's postmodernism, like they call it", he says breaking the silence. "Who knows the kind of friendships or relationships people used to have before. But what I know is that these days people who are far can be near, and people who are near can be far. We hide behind a pile of books, an online profile. And it's up to other people to break those walls around us ", he says. "You think?" I answer, but he starts to get going and I just watch him leave. I think he was talking to someone else and maybe I thought he was talking to me, I don't know. I just stayed in silence reckoning on what he'd said. I guess he's right, that's just the way it is now with human relationships, but, do you think that man was right about this postmodernism thing? What do you think? What's postmodernism anyway?"
I sip some tea. I look at him but he's not looking at me. He wasn't even listening the whole time.
