As I leave those grey ticks on our conversation, those increased green dots adding to my list of unread conversations, I realize I miss you, and I think about you sometimes, and yet I miss me too but don’t I always come back time and time again?
Maybe once before, half a decade ago, I enjoyed the increasing digits at the top bar of my phone, indicating my chats were rising, gave me pleasure to feel needed as I wished to feel, and for that, I solemnly thank you, for validating a need I so urgently required, a craving I needed to stop but didn’t quite know at the time.
The numbers fill me not with glee anymore, but an alarmingly high heart rate, and a sinking feeling I’ve only recently come to accept as guilt and her friend disappointment. They plague me on a daily basis because as the numbers increase so does my need to run, to flee, to be so alarmed that anyone in their right minds would want to talk to me.
But the energy too is gone, she left once for a short trip and didn’t make her way back to me and I fear she may be lost to me for good. I dread feeling needed, I dread the responsibility of another’s entertainment, pleasure, joy, pain, wonder…. does it make me odd?
To love my people, my tribe, my friends, my family, my soul, but not want to be directly associated with any pains or pleasures of their lives…I love my memories with you, I wouldn’t change a thing, and for each of you burns a candle in my memory, bad, good, ugly.
Does it make me lost? Being among you but not among you, wanting to occasionally run through your mind and you smile or curse or get so mad you break something, wanting to float ever so lightly on that thin veil between reality and spirit, being remembered every once in a while, but never really needed? Never really wanted either? Never really perceived, never really loved, never really hated either, never really strong, never really weak either, never really existed, but only barely, never really setting roots anywhere, but never really being gone with the wind, soaring through life as a maybe person.
I look at the darkening screen, knowing the chats are plenty now, knowing I should reply, knowing I should make an effort, but really I cannot, not for any loathing of the people or for anything bad or tough I could be going through, no, maybe merely for the fact that I cannot get the energy to converse…..my wishes and energy could flow to you, but my hands refuse to type anything and I’m left with the guilt and disappointment in myself.
The reason is that you wouldn’t know how much I have had conversations with every one of you in my head in settings and contexts of your own, individually, custom made conversations that never come to light, funny, sad, loud, whispers, loud whispers, even the people in my life that I haven’t yet met but still vibe so well with I have their conversations too.
Those conversations live freely in my mind but never appear in real life, or through text, where they would matter most, and I am sincerely apologetic about it because you deserve consistency, energy, will, affection, pleasure, pain, you deserve interaction, except I am not the one made for it, not constantly at least, and sometimes, not at all.`
Yet I sometimes sit in the dark and type out these conversations, these stories as they have become now, making each of the main characters in your own films, fueling it with a constant viewing of your online activities and occasional short conversations that I indulge in from time to time, sometimes going so far as to make some of you heroes.
Others are an amplified legend version of their characters and others even etched in future memories of successful legends and recycled circles of life with endless possibilities, endless outcomes, and I smile to myself, and I look down at my screen and frown because my mind has all the time to converse and create but no sense of real-time conversations.
I put my phone down and head to the kitchen to finish a few chores, wondering how long ill still have the green dots and the message notifications on my screen before that; little light gets snuffed out. Before it goes, Ill let you know I miss you, I won’t converse, because I don’t have the energy, its not a good enough reason to be an indecent person, and I by no means expect redemption. maybe a random explanation may make us feel less bad about how we think people view us, you cross my mind, quite often, my inability to converse is me not you, and that, is the truth.
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