FEEDING THE IGUANA

I've been rereading some old e-mails from over a year ago, and it strikes me that someone I corresponded with then, by cutting off contact, has demonstrated that despite what seemed to be a number of mutual interests, there was little more to the textual interchange than the poking of an interesting exemplar with a sharp stick to see what it would do.

I am somewhat irritated that that was all there was to the correspondence. Irked at being just an anthropological curiosity. A strange program on the nature channel. A bug with an iridescent shell.

I wonder, would I have been a more interesting creature if I had swung from the branches, and ate my own lice? If I had brilliantly coloured feathers? Perhaps I should've flung poo?

These questions are rather abstract, given that there is no more contact, and the writer of whom I speak is on the other side of the country. It is also something to which I do not wish to receive any answers - acquaintances come and go, readers pass by and vanish. And other people's lives must necessarily occupy the majority of their attention.

Not all similarities are similarities. Sometimes people are so utterly different in so many ways that other than a flash of mutual curiosity there is no common ground whatsoever. Which is often not immediately obvious.

Still, I sometimes wish that I could poke that specimen with a sharp stick.