Necessities

You know that feeling when you temporarily lose contact with someone you are used to talking to every day?  No?  Let me try to explain.

It’s not constant.  It’s not nagging or painful or distracting.  It doesn’t become a permanent disruption in your life.  It doesn’t wear you down or stress you out or remain in the front of your mind.

It does make you wonder if you did something wrong that you were ignorant of.  It makes you wonder if you are being avoided on purpose, or if you’ve been replaced.  It makes you question whether you are no longer a necessity in their life.

So what is that feeling really?  It’s that half-second pause when you realize they might not see the text you wanted to send.  It’s the beat when you see that they are not online.  It’s finding a hilarious article/picture/caption that you know they’ll love, but not being able to immediately get it to them.

So you save the links and anecdotes and jokes.  They accumulate faster than you realize.  Before you know it, you have a list of dozens of things you want to share.  You look at them again and delete a few, paring down to the absolute essentials, and then delete a few more.  You are still excited to share these, eager to get a response.

Then you finally hear from them again, and you look over at the list of things to share and suddenly they all seem stupid.  So you just talk.  And you realize that you didn’t really miss seeing their responses to funny things.  You just missed talking to them, seeing where the conversation heads.  You hear what they’ve been up to and what kept them out of reach.  You see that you weren't being ignored or replaced or forgotten.  You feel ridiculous.

They’ll ask what you’ve been up to while they’ve been so busy with life.  And you’ll have a few stories that pale in comparison to theirs.  Stories that will eventually come up down the road…or not.  So you’ll respond ‘not much’, and the conversation will continue on. 

And how does that feel?  Fantastic.

12.6.12  12:47pm