In Transit

I wake up to five Instagram notifications from one of my long-distance best friends. She is on vacation from one side of the world to the next, which is still a world away from me. Smiling from the screen and holding up her ring finger, she is elated. I fire off a tirade of effusive messages and go to her profile to see the rest of the photos—only to find it empty of announcements. Despite the miles and continents, it seems like I am one of the first to have gotten the happy news. Somewhere, in the depths of my chasming heart, I am touched.

A hundred years ago, I assume, we would be confined to letters. Painstakingly scribing out every loop and dot of every syllable. Agonizing over the order of words and placement of commas for fear of giving off the wrong impression. Or perhaps we would indulge ourselves in telegrams—that long-forgotten medium few of us remember and even fewer understand (but which seems to be making a comeback with the hurtling of our attention spans into the abyss and the optimization of every waking moment).

Now, I wait for Instagram messages which—due to lack of proximity and the fading of our once-for-granted togetherness—are at times as incomprehensible, and more dreaded, than telegram mechanisms.

At the outset of COVID, I proposed to my friend, who lived a mere few blocks away, that we strike up a letter correspondence. Since we were living in plague-infested cities, I thought we might as well buy into the aesthetic. The endeavour lasted all of two dispatches. Upon returning from my sojourn abroad, I attempted to establish a similar rapport—now via the oh-so-sophisticated email—with my friend from whom I was separated by an ocean.

There is something about the coming back to it. The epistolary form, more than anything, allows for the development of thought. A consideration of everything to be said. An even more careful weighing of things unsaid.

How much are we shaped by the tools that we use, as opposed to the comforting and omnipotent view of the other way around? There is something of the panopticon in the “viewed” and “read” and “seen.” Are we all just a shot-off text to one another? One notification away from intimacy, one swipe away from forgetting.

I have sent postcards, even scribbled with just a few words, to the ones I hold dear. It is a comfort to see them posted on their fridges and pinned to cork boards, even if later they are stashed away in memory boxes. When cleaning out my phone storage, I stumbled on screenshots I took of drunken texts with my friends. With no intention of ever redistributing them, I can only assume I felt the need to archivize, mythologize, grab something into place. They capture a single moment in time—a frozen instant where we are all still in the process of becoming.

But I will hardly print the pixels upon which they are housed. They will decay, get lost among storage reshufflings and changing iCloud accounts.

Reaching out is an exercise in potential rejection. The inconvenience of snail mail an ode—or perhaps a hope—to the fact that you matter. That there is no such thing as instant dismissal. Letters allow for existence in the liminal. A Schrödinger’s right to response, if you will. You are both valued and not.

We are creatures suspended in transit—between writing and being read, between seen and unseen. Every message, no matter how instantaneous, is a small act of faith. Somewhere in the delay, in the buffering and the waiting, we remember that distance still carries meaning. That perhaps connection is not in the reply at all, but in the reaching.