Time passed. I was single. Dating was misery, and made all the worse by the lack of an IM partner to whom I could talk to about exactly how unbelievably fucking miserable it was. Sounds crazy, but for weeks after his screenname turned gray, I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to message him about how horrible the previous night's date had gone in that old familiar, silly, semi-tongue-in-cheek inflection.
The alleged device to which the automated response referred was an enigma to me, and if it actually received the few IMs I sent to it, these receptions produced no fruit. My days became quiet. I was forced to deal with the turbulence in my life without digitally transmitted assistance. In short, I began to relearn how to shut up and work. My threshold for both panic and boredom slowly rose.
I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to message him about how horrible the previous night's date had gone. |
It's been two years since then. I've been dating someone new since last summer, and I recently mentioned to my friend Maggie that sometimes he and I go an entire twenty-four hours without speaking.
"You mean you don't IM?" she recoiled.
We don't. In fact, I don't think he even has Instant Messenger. He doesn't have the kind of desk job that I have — the kind where you don't so much "check" your email as stare at it for hours and hours like an autistic child. He has no clever screenname with which I can associate him, and though I message with coworkers and friends, I don't have any uninterrupted twenty-four-hour conversation in my life anymore. Even though he's the person with whom I want to share all the mindless details of my day. He disappears and reappears from morning to evening with lunar regularity.
At first I didn't like it. At work, I'd think of something I wanted to tell him, then realize it would have to wait until later. Even emailing didn't work — he'd take hours to respond. Eventually I came to terms with the fact that whatever ridiculous ideas or narratives were rooting around in my brain, I was just going to have to wait until nighttime to pour them all onto him.
Turns out, I like this way better. It gives me time to filter and organize. Here's what I do: I take all the inanity in my head, and I make a nice little smorgasbord. Like any good smorgasbord, it's served all at once, a mélange of many different textures — of worries and stories and crackpot hypotheses — both sweet and savory. I arrange everything on an attractive-looking platter, and when I finally see him at night, my smorgasbord is ready to serve, as is his. Had we dished them out piecemeal, they just wouldn't have tasted the same.
n°
