Eye Contact at the Wedding

On Saturday I attended a wedding. It’s been a long time since I was in an open social setting where I didn’t really know the people around me. My girlfriend was there, but the other people at the table I had never met. Thankfully, I was at a table of invited guests involved in racing, but this didn’t help me when it came to eye contact. 

When the conversation got around to cats, and my cat named Kansas, the natural question that comes is, “why Kansas?” To explain, I had to explain that people on Facebook named her after my book, and that led to the natural question of, “why Kansas?” It was in the explaining of that which led to my eye contact going everywhere.

It has been a very long while since I explained in person the reasoning of Kansas and the concept it represents. I knew the words, but in the noisy environment of a room filled with dining guests at a wedding, well, it just wasn’t easy to keep my eyes static. They darted around the person I was talking to without ever actually making eye contact. With each sentence’s end I would move my eyes to the opposite side I had been looking at. I tried to slow it down, but it was all but involuntary movements by this point. 

I wish I didn’t have the awareness of my lack of eye contact because as I tried harder to make eye contact the magnetic repulsion became stronger. It felt as if there were a magnetic field that didn’t allow me anything close to eye contact. It was frustrating, aggravating, and it almost got to the point that I forgot my words. 

Before the pandemic, I had gotten rather chameleon like in these environments, but it was obvious the lack of practice has my social skills with eye contact rusty, and when I know I was capable of almost looking like I fit in, it’a rough experiencing the regression.