correspondences

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i have wanted to keep my thoughts to myself, as if to gather them close to my breast and keep them safe. they felt so fragile they felt flimsical, as if the tiniest breeze could scatter them.

so many blog posts are apologies for having neglected one’s blog. i find this marvelous and vaguely annoying — the need to be accountable to one’s reader (marvelous), the further, unnecessary delay of proper blogging those apologetic sentences effect (slightly annoying). yet, what is proper blogging? what do we do when we blog? should i not apologize or at least explain myself to a friend i haven’t called or written to in a long time?

my friends never hear from me. yesterday i picked up the phone on the second ring (i felt reckless) and my friend M sputtered in surprise. he fully expected to speak into a machine. he did not expect a call back. i hardly ever call back.

i don’t have caller id.

there are 9 messages now in my old-fashioned answering machine. when the previous machine broke J and i were surprised by how difficult it is to find a plain old answering machine in stores. they all seemed to come with a phone attached. we didn’t want a new phone. we had a perfectly functioning phone (which, however, died only a few months later). we finally found a lonely one on the shelves of best buys, a little gray digital one. the one that broke was analog. we have 6 brand-new little tapes we’ll never use. if you want them drop me a line and i’ll mail them to you.

those nine messages are from people i should call back, people i still have to identify, people who left information i need but am too scattered to write down, or people whose voice and words i want to keep and play again and again. one of the people i should call back left a message almost a year ago.

sometimes i don’t answer emails, either. i figure they’ll keep. J gets very upset when his emails go unanswered for longer than a day or two. i say, J, look at me, there are emails from people i love that i haven’t answered in months. he doesn’t object to the non-answer, you see. he feels unloved. people can love you without replying to your emails, i say.

one never knows whether the email got there, either. there is no confirmation. it could be languishing in a spam folder.

my friend M just found in his spam folder an email from a publisher that wanted to offer him a contract for his book on caribbean literature. all emails are deleted after a month. this email was two weeks old.

people often want more than they are willing to give. when you give them what they want they feel guilty, a little, because they know they won’t reciprocate. i have a friend who shuts down when i get too personal about myself. “i’m worried about mortality” counts as too personal. we used to be close but she decided it was better for us not to be. we used to talk about mortality, debt, and the horrors of the bush administration several times a day. now personal disclosures on my part (of the kind i just described) are enough to stop an email exchange dead. i encourage personal disclosures from her, and she offers them to me in response. maybe i shouldn’t. maybe i should honor her decision to stay aloof. but i want to know. at the very least, i have to remember not to reciprocate. it’s not like she asks, anyway.

people run from intimacy. they find intimacy extremely threatening. i am sure they have excellent reasons for it. i suck at the breast of intimacy for my antibodies against the Extreme Loneliness of life. i’m a sucker that way.

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Filed under friends, love, sadness

Tags: calling, communication technology, emailing, friendship, intimacy, reciprocity, replying, talking