I'm an insecure friend. This makes me appear to be an uncaring friend, when really I sometimes feel paralyzed with caring a lot but not knowing what to do to be a good one and even concern that what I've thought of isn't good enough. So often I do nothing instead. Distance - physical or emotional - leads me to fall out of touch with a lot of people, sometimes when they live in the same space as me, when that is the last thing I want. I remember even as a child being aware of my friendship faults and insecurities. The good news is that I have some friends who haven't given up on me. The good news is that I was able to reconnect with someone through the lost domain of emailing that I thought I had lost but maybe I haven't. Here is my ode (not the John Keats kind) to finding old and lost friends:
"Building Words"
They say writing letters is an art
rapidly being lost to time and movements of quickness.
And I believe the ambiguous ‘them’ when the telephone
imposes spaces of stressed urgency to fill, reminding us both
of absence and
distance
and of the loudness of silence when words can’t
satisfy the
passage
of
time –
the quiet ending in a lonely void.
But the lost art has led to
the science of a foundedness of you
and for now letter by letter suffices as we repave bridges
that had been weather worn from disuse, reconnecting
through words carefully chosen and common, with
no immediacy of tied tongues, building
one on top of the next to reconstruct
what could become something
that looks like
friendship.
