Sorry I Never Answer My Texts
I live in fear of the moment before “goodbye”.
Do you know what I mean?
The pause over the phone or a lull in the conversation at the end of the night. Some people are comfortable with silence; others know silence precedes farewell.
I live in fear of the moment before “goodbye” because a child once believed she’d keep her first-grade best friend forever, and forever was forever until it wasn’t. Life is short and contact is accidental and somehow it’s been a month since I’ve called my mom. People feel like they are meant to be collected and kept and forever - really forever - loved. The favorited memories in my brain are laughing, talking, touching, playing, connecting with people. I love first conversations and I love soaking in the presence of a friend and I can’t bear to let any of it go.
And so I don’t. I’m a hoarder. I have never turned down a first conversation. I have never told a friend they couldn’t join my aloneness. Even when my schedule is stacked with back to back 15-minute slots, I squeeze a call on my walk between meetings. My texts are “maybes” and “laters” but never “no”.
I have, at any given point, hundreds of unread texts. From my closest friends, from my coffee chats, from my sign-in verification codes. Once in a blue moon, I blitz through them all, sending “thank you”s and “i love you”s and inciting little notifications that stress my friends out just as theirs stressed me. That’s modern friendship.
But after a year of meeting as many people as I possibly could was a spring and a summer and a fall where I stayed home. Surrounded by myself. And I realized that I liked myself, and wanted to spend time with her. And after another year where I had three people in the next room at any given point, I’m on a leave of absence, with just me again.
Every time I’m alone, I fall in love with how it feels. But I still can’t leave anyone behind.
I block out my schedule with little color-coded rectangles that remind me what my ideal day looks like. I block out my sleep and my projects and a breakfast that I love every morning. On paper, I know where my seconds tick. But my texts haunt me while I climb or work or wait for my oats to melt into warm water. I might have my hours blocked but there are no moments where I feel free from this weight.
I’m at an inflection: I can no longer accept the hypocrisy of declaring that time is non-negotiable and proceed to detach my focus from my ongoing life. I still cherish moments with people that make me feel alive. But the space in my head where the ridiculous red bubbles on my phone live is a guilty, heavy room. The joy that I used to love from a witty exchange has faded into a conviction of my neglect.
I’m writing to give a preemptive apology for a future refusal to apologize. Inevitably and frequently I have typed, “so sorry! i am so bad at responding.” But I am not sorry for not being on call. I am only sorry for my ambiguity that prolongs a conversation neither of us really care about. I am sorry for my inability to go. I am still afraid to be less accessible, to lose opportunities, to say goodbye. But the only way we can revel in a new space is by leaving this room.