Modern Love #1-Texting by Max Wallis
We send each other text messages at work. Discuss what we’re having for lunch. Ether-joined by unlimited messages and pixel screens.
Two minutes after saying goodbye on dates our phones jangle, vibrate, ‘I had a lovely time tonight : )’. The little xx means all the more from you. You give me less than my mum but it’s all the different. I look and linger at them, there at the end of your miniature letters.
Save the sweet ones in a folder and read them when down. ‘These are the reasons I love you.’ ‘Do you want to go to the cinema at four?’ ‘I’ve never felt this before.’ I smile when I see your name appear.
The lump is a plastic pebble in our pocket heavy with the weight of expectancy. Linked to everything, almost sentient it throbs with the lives of so many people a button press away: Facebook, e-mails, Google
and you.
When people are gone: vanished from our lives. Ephemeral ghosts that exist but don’t. That breathe, but don’t. The wishing wells in which we shed our coins.
Our thumbs linger over ‘DELETE’ as though they’ll disappear from memory, too. Punch. Gone. The love letters dead. Think that’ll make us feel better.
When our hearts turn red again we’ll wish we had the numbers still to say hello, hi, how do you do.