I Have No "Drama"

When I talk with friends, all sorts of drama comes up.

Stories about how a sister's husband cheated and she hired a private investigator to find out,
or stories about a mother-in-law falling for a romance scam.
Listening to them is interesting, and I even find myself wanting to know what happens next.

But every time I hear these stories, I suddenly wonder.
Maybe I don't have anything like that.

I don't have any "Hey, listen to this!" kind of stories, and
even when I'm asked, "Has anything happened lately?"
I just reply, "No, not really."

Even when I get together with friends, I naturally end up being the listener.
Usually, the person with a mountain of things to talk about takes center stage,
talks for a while, and then says, "Oh, sorry, has anything happened with you guys?"

I'm fine with that.
If I have something, I'll talk, and if I don't, I'll listen—that's all there is to it.

But then I suddenly realized.
The stories my friends tell are often about the people around them.
The cheating, the romance scam—it's not the friends themselves.
I thought, maybe they just happen to have those kinds of people around them... but then again, sometimes the friends I talk to most are talking about themselves.
Whether it's people around them or themselves, either way, I have no material to talk about.
It always comes back to that.

Is it that I have no drama to begin with, or that I don't perceive things as drama,
or is it just a hassle to talk about it?
I don't even know myself.

Perhaps even if something happened, I was too desperate to deal with it at the time.
Looking back, maybe quite a few things did happen.
But if I don't remember them, I feel like they might as well have never happened.

I feel like I'm watching my friends' life dramas without a subscription.
But the moment I step out of that theater, I sometimes feel relieved to return to my own quiet life.

However, while I'm listening, my mind is actually quite busy.
As I listen to my friends, I'm secretly having a conversation with myself.
Things like, "That's crazy," or "Maybe my home life isn't so bad after all."
On the outside, I'm a quiet listener, but on the inside, I'm secretly bustling.
That might be the reality of "me, who has nothing."

And when I get home, my husband asks, "What did you talk about today?"
It's a hassle, so I just answer, "Oh, all sorts of things," and leave it at that.
I don't like being grilled for details, and besides, the conversation jumps all over the place, so I don't even remember what the main point was myself.
At my age, I can't even remember what I had for lunch yesterday, so it's even more impossible.

The me who was listening is surprisingly like that, too.

I don't have any exciting drama, but today, too,
I am living my quiet daily life just fine.

Now then, will I be able to remember what I ate tomorrow?