by S. Cole

Created on: January 03, 2009

The Network

Dear Friend.

Dear Friend. I could not simply write this in a letter to you as by now I am sure you can no longer process that medium of communication. I suppose I may only hope you are able to receive this message verbally, as it is the means that I have chosen to send it. I'm sure a formal letter, or letter of any kind written with ink on paper would not only fail to reach you, but I know it would not have the power of tone, that my voice carries, and that I hope you hear the heartache within.

Maybe you do not know heartache now.

After all, heartache is an individual feeling having much to do with loneliness. Do you know loneliness? Are you even an individual any longer? I remember the last time that I saw you, you were not. Only a small bit of you remained. I could see the Friend I once knew in your right eye, and even that wandered to the parts of you that had already left me; in your ear on the same side, and in the palm of your right hand as you shook mine when we parted. Too formal for a friend, wouldn't you say?

I am telling you this from the spot where we used to come and tell each other stories. Real ones about the people we have known. What we hated about them and how they intrigued us. And how the ones that intrigued us the most were the ones that we loved, simply because of our inability to hate them; and even when we did hate them, how we could still love them somehow. I am leaning against the pay phone where you would often lean when we congregated here, breathing in the evening air as you did once, and supporting my back and my heart with the strength of its steal casing. The phone, of course, is dead. Communication in that form has gone; this is an artifact, a monument of our friendship and the simplicity of the world that is as dead as the device.

I visited your mother the other day. She was upset. I think mainly it was that you are no longer there for her to talk to. She is not taking it well, though she said that your voice continues to linger, and when that is finally gone she is not sure what she will do. I haven't heard your voice in weeks, and I told your mother as much. She gave me a flash drive in hopes that I will maintain our friendship and I told her thank you'. I threw it into the river on my way home. I passed a sewer and considered throwing it down there but thought I would regret it because it was not the small device I was angry at but you. The Friend I knew and talked to face to face, that I hugged on occasion and would

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