I met a skeleton shortly after arriving in a new town, although I didn’t realize he was a skeleton at first. From a distance he looked like everyone else gathered in small circles, chatting, laughing, and signing. A friend pointed him out and spoke of him with a level of admiration that immediately caught my attention. According to local legend, he was one of the finest communicators in town. People described him as brilliant, logical, precise, and deeply knowledgeable about language. The way they talked about him, I expected to meet a master storyteller, the kind of person who could make an ordinary trip to the grocery store sound like an epic adventure.
Naturally, I introduced myself.
The first few minutes felt normal enough. He greeted me politely and answered my questions without hesitation. His signs were recognizable. His vocabulary seemed extensive. His timing appeared appropriate. Yet something felt strangely off. It was like listening to a familiar song played on an instrument that was slightly out of tune. The melody was still there, but something essential was missing. I found myself concentrating harder than usual, replaying sentences in my head and searching for clues that never appeared. The more he signed, the more puzzled I became.
At first I blamed myself. Maybe I was tired from traveling. Maybe he used a regional variation I wasn’t familiar with. Maybe I had simply missed a few signs. But as the conversation continued, a troubling pattern emerged. Every sentence seemed to arrive with exactly the same emotional weight. Questions felt no different from statements. Excitement felt no different from disappointment. Jokes landed with the energy of tax instructions. Even his stories felt strangely preserved, as if they had been sealed in a jar decades ago and only recently opened.
Then I finally noticed what my brain had been trying to tell me all along.
The man had no face.
Well, technically he had a face. It simply wasn’t doing anything. No eyebrows rose to mark a question. No eyes widened with surprise. No cheeks tightened to add emphasis. No mouth shifted to convey skepticism, amusement, or concern. The entire landscape of expression had been replaced by a permanent blankness. It was then that I realized I wasn’t talking to a communicator. I was talking to a skull.
Suddenly everything made sense.
The more I watched, the more evidence appeared. His hands were little more than thin arrangements of bone. Every classifier looked undernourished. Every description seemed to arrive missing half its details. When he described a mouse, it looked remarkably similar to a bear. When he described a bear, it looked remarkably similar to a mailbox. His stories contained events but somehow lacked scenes. They contained characters but somehow lacked personalities. Information moved from point A to point B, but nothing came alive along the way.
What fascinated me most was that the skeleton considered this a strength.
When I cautiously suggested that facial expressions carried important information, he dismissed the idea entirely. Expressions, he explained, only created ambiguity. Emotion distracted from facts. Personality cluttered the message. Storytelling wasted valuable time. In his view, language worked best when stripped down to pure information. He spoke about communication the way a minimalist speaks about furniture. If something served more than one purpose, it was probably unnecessary.
The longer he explained his philosophy, the more absurd it became. He reminded me of a chef who proudly removed flavor from food, a painter who eliminated color from paintings, or a musician who concluded that silence was the purest form of music. Every solution seemed to involve removing the very thing people enjoyed. Somehow he had mistaken the skeleton of communication for communication itself.
By the end of the evening, I understood why people found him so fascinating. The skeleton wasn’t frightening because he was a skeleton. The frightening part was the idea he represented. He had spent years dismantling communication piece by piece, removing expression, emotion, personality, nuance, rhythm, and human connection. Then he stood proudly beside the pile of bones and called it an improvement.
As I walked home that night, I thought about language and all the tiny things that give it life. The raised eyebrow that turns a statement into a question. The subtle smirk that transforms criticism into humor. The widening eyes that invite someone into a story. The countless visual details that carry meaning beyond words themselves.
The skeleton had spent a lifetime trying to perfect communication by removing everything that made it human.
And to his credit, he succeeded.
What remained was perfectly organized, perfectly logical, perfectly efficient, and completely dead.
👓 💀 🫱🏽🫲🏼
#Selfcare #MentalHealth #semicolon #Anxiety
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