Waiting for a Turn to Speak

The coffee shop was loud, but to her, the noise felt miles away.
She looked across the small wooden table at her friend, who was busy typing a text. She felt a familiar, heavy ache in her chest. She had promised herself she would finally speak up today.

“Hey?” she started, her voice barely carrying over the espresso machine.

Her friend didn’t look up immediately, her thumb flying across the screen. “Hmm? Yeah, what’s up?”

“I’ve been feeling really disconnected lately with everyone,” she said, her fingers tightly gripping her warm mug. “Like I’m drowning in a room full of people, but nobody actually sees me. It’s this heavy, hollow kind of loneliness.”

Her friend finally dropped her phone onto the table, leaning forward with wide eyes. “Oh, tell me about it! I went through the exact same thing last Tuesday. I was sitting at my desk, and I realised nobody had asked me how my weekend was. It is so exhausting when people are that self-absorbed. I just shut down completely.”

She’s doing it already, she thought, her heart sinking a little deeper. She heard a word that triggered a memory of herself, and immediately jumped on it. She isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at her own reflection in my pain.

“Right,” she said softly, trying to steer the focus back before it slipped away entirely. “But it’s not just a bad day for me. It feels like a permanent state. I try to open up, but it feels like the moment the words leave my mouth, they just disappear. No one is actually listening.”

“Exactly!” Her friend threw her hands up in agreement. “That’s why I always say you have to be assertive. If you don’t stand your ground and command the room, people will just walk all over you. Like yesterday, my manager tried to cut me off during the presentation, but I just kept speaking louder until he stopped. You just have to have my kind of confidence.”

She stared at her friend. Confidence. Loudness. Her friend genuinely believed that emotional pain could be solved by just shouting over it. She didn’t want to understand her thought process; she just wanted to give a monologue involving her.

“I don’t want to command a room,” she said, her voice dropping, trying to inject gravity into the air. “I just want a genuine conversation. I want to feel safe enough to share what’s actually going on inside my head. But it feels like people only want to talk at me, not with me.”

Her friend sighed, leaning back and crossing her arms. “Well, you’ve always been a bit mysterious. You can’t blame people for not knowing what’s wrong if you don’t share. Personally, I’m an open book. I think it’s a gift, honestly. I tell people exactly what I’m feeling, when I’m feeling it. It makes me incredibly emotionally intelligent.”

The phrase stung. Emotionally intelligent. She wanted to laugh, but it felt too bitter. True emotional intelligence required the capacity to hold space for someone else, to be still, to observe. Her friend was just loud about her own life and ego.

“I want to share,” she said, the frustration finally leaking into her tone. “But sharing requires the other person to actually stop, listen, and try to understand. Anyone can only share if you are worth sharing with. If they just twist everything to be about them, it makes you want to close up even more.”

Her friend’s expression shifted instantly. The casual indifference hardened into defensive anger. “Wait, are you saying I don’t listen? Because I’m literally sitting here listening to you right now! Wow. It’s so unfair that you’re attacking me when I’ve had the most stressful week of my life. I came here to relax, and now I’m the bad guy?”

And there it is, she thought, a cold wave of exhaustion washing over her. The pivot. The sudden rewrite of history where her friend becomes the victim. She was the one bleeding out, but her friend was crying about the stain on her shoes.

“I’m not attacking you,” she said, her energy evaporating. “I’m just trying to tell you that I am hurting.”

“Well, it feels like an attack,” her friend scoffed, looking away. “You always do this—you make me feel like I’m the problem when I’m just trying to help you based on my own experiences. It’s really draining for me to carry everyone else’s drama on top of my own.”

She looked at her friend—truly looked at her—and realised the wall was completely impenetrable. There was no amount of phrasing, no level of vulnerability, and no combination of words in the human language that would ever make her see past herself.

To her friend, her pain wasn’t a cry for help; it was just an interruption to her own monologue.

She pulled her jacket tighter around herself, physically retreating. “Never mind. You’re right. Forget I said anything.”

Her friend’s posture relaxed instantly. The tension drained from her shoulders, and she reached back for her phone.

“Thank you,” her friend said, tapping her screen. “I knew you didn’t mean it that way. Anyway, you won’t believe what happened after that presentation…”

As her friend’s voice faded into a background drone of “I” and “me,” she sat in total silence. She realised a terrifying truth: you can speak for hours, but you can never be heard by someone who is only listening for their turn to speak.

Her friend didn’t even notice that she had completely checked out. She didn’t notice the sudden, heavy quiet, or the way her eyes had gone completely vacant. Her friend was entirely content, comfortably wrapped in the illusion of a conversation, completely unaware that she had just permanently closed the door on a friend who desperately needed her to open it.