As a kid, my techniques to dealing with my introversion were pretty similar to the ones I use now. When I got too overwhelmed, I would find a place to hide, hang out for about five minutes and then return to the fray. The difference now is that it isn't usually under a table anymore...not usually. Unfortunately for me, I was the oldest of the youngests. This is not an oxy moron. The clan of cousins was divided between the oldest kids and the youngest kids in our respective families. The middle kids were distributed according to their standing with the oldest kids, and the rejects were inserted into the group of youngest kids. My cousins were large-hearted characters in those days, my cousin Jeremiah was allowed passage into the realm of oldest kids, and my cousin Danelle, when she forced her way to the parapet of older kid-dom, was accepted willingly. My cousin Mariah, who ought to have been a younger kid, was too close to my sister to be disallowed the shelter of her affection and thus she graduated without ceremony into the enviable position of an older kid. This left Jacob, Angela, Richard and myself, and I was the oldest.
The part of our lives that made us, we four, the ignoble “little kids” a scourge and a blight upon the big kids is that there were so few of us, and they were often obliged to invest time in us, mostly by having us about while they talked. Thus, they were not permitted to speak on the fringes of profanity, as they would like, nor could they discuss the illicit subjects of abstract romance or obscure anatomy for fear of being ratted out by us untrustworthy young'uns. Often, I would leave the room to recharge and find that they had taken advantage of my absence to talk about all the things they couldn't while I was around.
In a matter of minutes, these brilliant prodigies had the capacity to develop a whole new language of innuendo, and whenever I got back, attracting their attention by entering the room, I was the unfortunate brunt of the product.
“Hey, L'ici!"
“...Hi.”
“Do you like gummy bears?”
“...Yes...?”
Much giggling would ensue. Obviously, I had said the wrong thing, and was thus being ridiculed justly, but I could not fathom what I had said wrong.
“What color?” a cousin would ask.
This was, intellectually, the easy part. “Red.”
The giggling, if possible, was worse. Siblings threw back their heads in mirth. Tall, imposing cousins looked upon me in mockery and scorn, and I knew only that I had broken some unknown code, some new game with new rules, and was being vilified for it, and there was nothing for me to do but grin stupidly and laugh with them. I usually needed another moment to recharge shortly thereafter and the whole rotten business would start all over again.
I'm older now, I dress better, and when I crawl under tables it is for whimsical or investigative purposes. Now, I still need to recede when I've been around other people for too long, I am still easily confused by social games which I do not understand, and tend to react to similar tight spots with stupid looks and, occasionally, attempts to mentally escape into nearby paintings, but there are some games, such as this one, that I have learned the trick to. So, when I went to pay a visit to my now distant sibling, we were inflicting our wit on other people rather than exclusively on ourselves. The only time the chimera of the old verbal bait and switch game reared its ugly head, I thought that I was ready for it.
Oddly enough, I wasn't even receding for a recharge at that time, I had ventured into the kitchen in quest of the elusive cranberry juice beast. In the midst of my silent hunt, I could hear my brother-in-law and sister enter the next room and begin talking quietly back and forth. Their voices were low, muffled with the rustling of what sounded like a plastic bag being jostled. The only words I could hear were as follows: “Film. FILM. Film film film. I love film, ha ha ha. FIIIIILLLLMMMMM! Filmy filmy film!”
Oh dear, they were at it again. How could they? Really. We're all adults here, aren't we? We all have checkbooks and bills to pay, so I would have thought we had moved past this point. After all, I was the one who introduced them to the practise of adding the phrase “in bed” to the end of every fortune cookie. Surely they were not now going to toss innuendo at me, not when I had already proven my prowess at innuendo flinging madness.
The cranberry juice beast was vanquished. I rinsed the empty glass (all that remained of my prey) and emerged into the living room, armed and ready for verbal battery.
“Hey, Ellice,” my sister said, a fanatical gleam in her eye. “Want some film?!”
I put my hands on my hips and raised one eyebrow, which is the sardonic person's equivalent of aiming a nuke at somebody else, as I said, “And 'film' would be a codeword for what?”
Their expressions froze. They blinked at me, first he then she. Then she reached into a plastic bag and extracted a canister of camera film.
