Unrequited Words

It’s strange how your childhood sort of feels like forever. Then suddenly you’re sixteen and the world becomes an hourglass and you’re watching the sand pile up at the wrong end. And you’re thinking of how when you were just a kid, your heartbeat was like a kick drum at a rock show, and now it’s just a time bomb ticking out. And it’s sad. And you want to forget about dying. But mostly you just want to forget about saying goodbye.

All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call “aware” — an almost untranslatable word meaning something like “beauty tinged with sadness.”

A phone holds a thousand memories. Not just in the hundreds of pictures that could tell my story, but in my music, in the text messages and the ones I never sent, in my voice memos, in the games I play to pass the time away secretly waiting to hear from you, in the way my ear presses against the glass just to hear your voice, in the way my lips teased the phone talking to you and whispering to you late at night and yelling at you because really I just missed you so fucking much and I’m sorry for crying while there wasn’t anything you could do… but most of all, in all the silence of our slightly opened lips desperately begging it to just say how we really feel for each other. A phone remembers the silence it had to endure between people.