I don’t know anyone—really know anyone—who replies to “how are you?” with “fine, you?”. If they ever did, I’d assume they were telling me to go fuck myself.
When I say this kind of thing to people, they tend to explain it through the lens of their own special interest. It’s a neurodivergent thing (maybe?) and I have a lot of neurodivergent friends (definitely). It’s a [Mediterranean / Latin / Jewish / anything but British] thing, and I, the child of immigrants, have mostly friends who are at the very least slightly conflicted over which ethnicity box to tick on the questionnaire. Occasionally it’s just that I bleed therapist vibes and people want to open up to me.
I like that one.
I’m all in or nothing
I have no chill. None. If my brain registers you as a friend, you’re a friend. You can now ask me whatever you want, and you’ll get an answer with more detail than you really wanted. And I want to know about you. How you are. How you really are, right now.
That doesn’t mean the answer can’t sometimes be “eh, okay, I guess?”. That’s a legitimate feeling, at times when there’s capacity to spare, but not that much. A neutral shrug is sometimes exactly what the universe deserves.
In fact I tend to think of neutrality as a bit of a treat. I spend most of my life either high on adrenaline or hand-cranking my brain to do basic functions, so that point in the middle seems to me something equivalent to the feeling evoked by the phrase “ignorance is bliss”.
For this reason, I also worry that as well as being a good friend, I’m a demented friend. Or, like, insanely over-familiar far too quickly. I’m not oblivious—I know when someone doesn’t like me1 or when our personality mismatch is a lost cause—but give me an inch and I’ll take an overly enthusiastic hug (I have the kind of tits that make those great) and probably one text or DM too many.
Just don’t send me a voice message if it’s important because I forget to listen to those about 57% of the time. Also when I do it’s on 1.5x speed. And then I’m surprised you don’t sound like a coked-up rabbit IRL.
Oh! Here’s probably the weirdest thing I do, but it’s something an old friend of mine did say he loved about me, so maybe it’s not too terrible. I will tell you why I like you. Like exactly why I like you. Really specific compliments that I don’t really think of as compliments so much as observations. It might possibly make it seem a bit like I’m obsessed with you (and I am, but not skin-suit obsessed; though that’s what someone putting the lotion in the basket might want you to think). It’s just that I don’t know how to be surface level. And I’m an astonishingly bad liar for someone who was once a fairly good actress.
My audio processing isn’t that great and I get tinnitus and oppressive vibes from thumping music, which I always assumed was why I couldn’t do idle chit chat in a loud venue. It turns out, of course, that what I think of as ‘idle chit chat’ is cutting really quickly to that time your second brother went through a phase of eating dog biscuits like cereal. I won’t know your surname yet, but I will know how your mum’s inability to make lasagna without somehow ruining it is a running joke in the family and came up at your wedding.
I like to tell people about the time my dad tried to do DIY; after much swearing and clanking he asked my mother if there were any apples in the house. To her “yes, why?”, he sheepishly pointed out that was about the size of item they’d need to plug the hole he’d left in the wall. (I believe he was trying to drill in a couple of screw holes to fit a shower head.)
You’d think by now I’d have a way of circling back to the point, but that’s exactly it. I don’t want to talk in a circle: fine, you? Fine, you? Fuck. You.
So… um…. hey, wanna be friends?
Mixed signals do throw me, so if you sometimes respond and sometimes don’t I might take longer than most to realise that I’ve been dismissed. But when I do I promise I will disappear without a trace and never call you out. Even if you’re a dick about it. Actually, especially if you’re a dick about it, because you don’t deserve my Grand Display of Graciousness and I certainly won’t be pretending it’s my fault.
Always.
Even though I think we only met a grand total of two times, I still remember them very fondly. I like to think there's a world where my family stayed in London and we became very good mates!