You know it’s bad when I’m sitting at my computer, thinking about how to formulate a poem about what I can do before they reply. You know the “they.” The friends who say they’re there for me whenever I need, but when I do need them, it’s like I’m texting them in some technology orb where my texts have been lost in transit, and it would get to them (their phone) three to five business months later. When I’ve already moved on and thought they didn’t care. That they didn’t care about how my next book is about to be published or how I got a poem accepted into a magazine. Or how I thought of them when I saw something they mentioned to me only once, three years ago, when we were still in university. I wonder if they remember that time. The time when we saw each other upwards of three or four times a week. When we would sit in the back of the class and talk (but not when the professor was talking). Or whenever we went to the coffee shop on campus during our 15-minute break to grab a bite to eat. If I were to ask them, would they remember? Remember that time when it felt like nothing else mattered? I know, I know. A cliché has shown up in this poem. But please, forgive me. Forgive me for the times I think about them at night, but feel like I can’t text them first because I think they wouldn’t care. I mean, why would they? Why would they all care about me when their response (well, really, their lack of response) tells me something? It tells me that maybe I shouldn’t be texting any of them. Maybe I shouldn’t tell them I care about them, because why would I tell them when it makes me sound soft—when it makes me sound like a desperate ex that wants them back?
This is getting kind of long, isn’t it? I guess I had more to say than the title implied. But this is how I feel when I see that my messages have been left on ‘delivered’ for a week now, and I’m left wondering what happened to us. What happened to us when we were a few years younger and in the same area? In the same building that brought us together? What happened to those uncontrollable laughs we had in the hallways of campus after class ended and we just wanted to be home already?
What happened to us? Not to sound like the other person in a romantic relationship, trying to save what we have before we eventually break up. I just want to know. I want to know why they all forget to reply to me like I’m “some other person” whose name shows up on their phone on some random Saturday. I just wanted to talk to them. But maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent that message to see how they’re doing if it meant even me forgetting I had sent it. And I tend not to forget.
But my question still remains: what happened to us?
I should probably ask them that. But that’s another can of worms that I do not want to open. They would reply eight to ten days later and explain what’s going on. That they all ‘just so happen’ to always be terrible at replying to texts. And then I’ll tell them (obviously with different words to each and every one) that I feel unwanted. Unvalued. And that I feel like they just don’t care. And then the conversations would end feeling productive, like those school days when they’d finished a week’s worth of schoolwork in one afternoon. They would all try. They’ll try to do better for a few days. But they’d eventually fall back into those same ol’ patterns. They wouldn’t notice, of course. But I will. And then I would wonder why I even told them in the first place. Why did I open a piece of myself only for us to be left back to where we started?
The list. There’s a list of things I could do before they all reply.
You know it’s bad when I’m sitting at my computer, thinking about how to formulate a poem about what I can do before they reply. You know the “they.” The friends who say they’re there for me whenever I need, but when I do need them, it’s like I’m texting them in some technology orb where my texts have been lost in transit, and it would get to them (their phone) three to five business months later… It’s five and a half months later. And I’ve moved into a place that feels more like home. They don’t know. Of course, they don’t. Because it feels awkward to send another message, knowing they probably wouldn’t reply. Knowing that they probably wouldn’t click on it because they wanna know what’s happening in my life. I’m the speck of dust on their glasses that they couldn’t be bothered to clean. Because I’m that tiny splash of pink paint on their bedroom walls that they didn’t even notice was there. Because I am the person they all never even thought about in the first place.