I Speak in Rhyme When I'm Nervous
Job interviews become recitals; first dates become open mics.
I lost a job offer at a bank because I told the interviewer, out loud, in a conference room with glass walls, "I'm great with spreadsheets, sir, no doubt, they're what my life is all about."
He blinked at me for four full seconds. I know it was four because I counted them in iambs.
Here is my condition, stated plainly, the way the internet forums never do when you search for weird nervous habits at two in the morning: when my anxiety crosses a certain line, I rhyme. Not on purpose. Not charmingly. My mouth simply reaches for the nearest matching sound the way other people's hands reach for a railing.
Fear turns me into a greeting card with a pulse.
It started when I was seven, in the school hallway, waiting to be scolded for something involving a fire drill and a hamster. My mother swears I looked up at the principal and said, "I didn't mean to cause a fuss, the hamster wanted to see the bus." The principal laughed so hard she forgot the scolding. My nervous system, which is not smart but is very observant, took a note: rhyme equals survival... It has never once updated the file.
Childhood is where every strange habit signs its lease. I wrote about that hallway years later, actually wrote about it, when a poem about childhood finally forced me to stop treating my own wiring as a punchline and start treating it as a story. But for two decades in between, it was just the thing that ruined solemn occasions.
A partial record of my crimes:
At my cousin's wedding, asked to say a few words, I gripped the microphone and heard myself announce, "May your love stay strong and true, and may your in-laws like you too." The in-laws did not laugh. The bride did, thank God, or I would be writing this from exile.
At the doctor's office, when a nurse asked if I was nervous about the blood test: "Just a little, I confess, needles cause me some distress." She wrote something on my chart. I have never been brave enough to request my records.
At a funeral. I will not repeat what I said at the funeral. The widow, mercifully, was a kind woman, and she told me afterward, holding both my hands, that it was the only moment all day she had felt like smiling. I still think about that. It did not feel like absolution at the time. It does now.
And then there are first dates, which for me are not dates so much as unticketed performances. Nerves peak at exactly the moment the other person says, "So, tell me about yourself." You can imagine. Many of them could not get out of the coffee shop fast enough. One man simply stood up, said, "I don't think this is going to work," and left me with both cups and the bill, and my traitor mouth called after him, "That's alright, I understand, life does not go quite as planned." The barista gave me a free muffin. Pity muffins taste like regular muffins, if you were wondering. Warmer, somehow.
For years I tried to cure it. Breathing exercises, which just gave my rhymes better lung support. A therapist, who was lovely, and whom I liked so much that I relaxed and never rhymed once in her office, making the whole thing unbillable as evidence. A month of deliberately monotone speech that made three separate coworkers ask if I was okay.
The turn came at, of all places, another job interview. A small company, a panel of three, my palms flooding. The managing director asked why I had left my last position, and I felt the meter rising in my throat like a tide, and I was so tired.
Tired of clamping my jaw, tired of the four-second blinks, tired of translating myself into prose for people who were never going to hire the real applicant anyway.
So I let it happen.
"The last place paid me well enough, but every day just felt like bluff. I want to build a thing that's true. I'm hoping I can do that too... with you."
Silence. The longest of my life.
Then the woman on the left, the one who had not spoken all morning, leaned forward and said, "Did you just do that live?"
"Unfortunately," I said, in prose, because the worst had already happened and my nerves had nothing left to protect.
She hired me.
Not because of the rhyme, she claims, but she also introduces me at company events as "our copywriter, who runs on rhythm the way the rest of you run on coffee," so I have my suspicions.
The thing I spent twenty years muzzling turned out to be the only part of me people remembered.
That sentence took me a long time to be able to say without flinching. Somewhere along the way I had decided my brain's strange music was a malfunction, when it was, all along, just an instrument I had never been taught to hold.
So I started holding it on purpose. I wrote at night, real poems, unrhymed ones too, discovering the difference between rhyme as a spasm and rhyme as a choice. When I ran dry, I worked from a prompt that started it all one insomniac Tuesday: write about the thing your body does without permission. Four drafts later I had the hallway, the hamster, the principal, all of it.
I entered that poem into a monthly poetry contest under my real name, which for a person who spent decades hiding the habit was roughly equivalent to skydiving. It did not win. I did not care... or rather, I cared for one evening, ate the entire condolence pizza, and woke up lighter. The poem existed. The file had been updated at last: rhyme equals survival, yes, but also rhyme equals mine.
You are wondering about the dates. Fine.
Two years ago, a first date, a bookshop café, my usual pre-show terror. She asked me to tell her about myself, and I braced for the recital, and out it came, something mortifying about liking dogs and dialogue and Sunday fog. I closed my eyes... and waited for the chair scrape.
Instead I heard, in a voice fighting down laughter, "Well, that's the strangest thing I've heard, but honestly? I love a matching word."
I opened my eyes. She was blushing harder than I was. It turns out that when she gets nervous, truly nervous, she rhymes back. Deliberately, defensively, a habit built in a childhood of her own. Two greeting cards with pulses, finding each other in a bookshop.
We do not rhyme much at home. Home is where neither of us is nervous, and that, I have realized, is the entire point of it. But at weddings, at hospitals, in glass conference rooms, when one of us hears the other's sentences begin to chime, we reach over and take a hand.
The meter settles. The tide goes out.
And if it doesn't, we just finish each other's couplets, and let the room blink at us, four full seconds at a time.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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