Email is such a wonderful idea, but in reality I find it just as hard as papery lettery things to write and even harder to send. Because the other person is usually much better at replying and so I get an email really quickly which means I have to try and grind out another one in reply or the guilt becomes unbearable.
Well, unbearable up till about 3 months and then it's just a dull shameful ache..
I'm so crap at keeping in touch. I have several really really good friends who I've not emailed/written to in over 2 years.. Or even seen or spoken to them in that time.
I wonder if they're still good friends.
Unfortunately that's the way I am. I can not see someone for years and then just pick up the friendship again. Or at least try to, try to find out who they are now and if I like them. Most often I still do - people do change but there's a centre that always stays the same.
As long as the friendship was built around interlocking facets of your inner workings then the friendship will remain. Sometimes I find that the friendship was just a peripheral thing, not connected to the people that you are at the core. Then it's just like meeting a stranger, finding the person inside and seeing if there's a fit. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't. Sometimes I just can't find the person underneath.
Sometimes I can't bring myself to open myself, reveal my personality. Often nothing to do with the other person but to do with my own internal battles and neuroses.
I wonder how many of my friends have given up on me over the years due to lack of contact and, when they do happen, the unsatisfying meetings we have.
I never stop thinking about people.
Lovers, friends, acquaintances, flatmates, workmates, randoms.
All the people who I've at some stage connected with. I think about them, I wonder what they're doing now. I even sometimes make half-arsed attempts at contact.
An email started, never finished. A couple of pages of a letter. A card, bought for a birthday, never sent. A compilation cd made on a whim.
Almost never do I get any further.
Not because I don't want to send whatever it was that made me think of them, or that I lose interest. More that I start to doubt the relevance of anything I'd have to say. The appropriateness of a gift. Whether the humour in the card is what they'd find funny now.
Whether they have anything resembling my taste in music anymore.
So I stop.
The letter/email/whatever stops.
And sits.
Becomes yet another in the pile of unfinished correspondence that I can't finish yet can't throw away.
Because that would be admitting defeat, that wouldn't be an end or a finishing. It would mean a return to the beginning. But not a clean, start-over beginning. A beginning already tainted by apologies and explanations and excuses. Weasel words.
And shame.
...
And now I've run out of words to finish this.
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