Perhaps it was the giddiness of staying in a five-star hotel or maybe the discombobulation of random cool pecks on the cheek by people I’ve yet to meet. I’m not used to that, nor do I understand how everyone thinks it’s sophisticated rather than invasive. In fact, the only one whom I was okay with this familiar greeting is maybe that one co-worker of Cade’s who took a sip of my mojito over the summer. He and Cade.
Whatever it was, I somehow left my cellphone in a posh hotel in Lawnguy Land. The one means of communication at my disposal as I set out to fly home for the holidays - gone. I was able to go to the Cingular store and buy another one, instantly terminating the functioning of the lost one. What I couldn’t get back was the SIM card with my life on it - family, friends lost and found, people whom I used to be infatuated with, whom I used to call regularly. Gone.
In some ways, it is a forced clean slate. There were numbers I kept, just so I could screen their owners’ calls if they ever called and some numbers that would ring and ring, no one willing to answer the phone miles away. Numbers of people I hurt and people who hurt me.
There are still friends with information I know I will get, people I see regularly or can email. But what about him - my great stoic college friend who won’t answer the email, who is somewhere in Austin not knowing he is lost to me? I know no way to speak to him anymore, not that we spoke recently before I lost the old phone, but still. I really feel the distance now.
It makes me sympathize with my dad, who recently found out his childhood best friend died of a terrible terminal illness. The pain was so raw, the reminder of his own mortality stunning. His friend had known he was sick, that he would die for months, but never called. The grief is not just about the lack of goodbye, for a goodbye could have been, but that between getting married and having kids and moving and getting sick, they stopped picking up the phone. Life got busy; phone calls needed to wait. Numbers got misplaced or slipped the mind, priorities got rearranged.
I’ve already had to feel the pang of regret, of I-should-have-known-but-I-didn’t-ness when a close childhood friend had two kids and got married, and I wasn’t there. Never mind that I hardly recognize her, that she wouldn’t recognize me. She hasn’t been a significant part of my life for years now, but I promised I’d be there. Way back in seventh grade, I said I’d know her now. I thought I’d know her number when she called, that we’d be able to say all that goes unsaid. I thought I’d know how to reach her.
back up your hard drive now!