Interactions, pt. 2

In the following time that I spent in this strange place, the people and their culture began to unravel before me. The rare friendships that few people had with each other fell apart. Any romance people had turned into betrayal, and all this while I was honored, not blamed. Men and women, old and young... all reacted the same to me. No one was left untouched by this unusual phenomenon. It knew no class difference, no gender or racial difference. In fact, as I write this chronicle of what went wrong, I realized that though people's skin color varied, there was no conscious differing based on skin tone either.

This journey brought about much discovery about myself, especially the moments when I saw myself react to the customs of this world that I was unfamiliar with. Shock and awe were experienced side by side with fear and outrage. Some things I saw were worse than what John saw before me as an outsider to a civilization similar to this one. Oh John; I remember our talks together as he purged his thoughts of the nightmarish world of the World State. With picture-like words John would take in whoever would listen. Some people at the Reservation even thought him mad after hearing of his experiences.

No longer will I be aligned with those who claim of John's maddness. First, I must start with how I stumbled upon these people. Human interactions always intrigued me, even before John and I began talking with each other. I would fill my days sitting in the shade of a nearby tree and watch the people on the Reservation deal with each other. Though I was too far to hear the words they used, I could tell what was going on by how people carried themselves and the movements they used. For each word spoken, hundreds more were left unverbalized, spoken instead with their bodies. The majority of misunderstandings came from misinterpreting these non-verbal forms of communication that came with body usage in conversation.