In the past week I’ve had a few calls with my French friends. I hadn’t seen or heard them in six years.
I’m trying to analyze. How casual and absolutely overwhelming that is. I call, the camera shows that I’m in some decent light, I wait for them. They show up, exactly as I remember them. Same voice. Same living room. Same body language. Same shit going on there. Exciting and disappointing altogether.
It’s not soothing. It feels harsh, like walking through a parking lot in a heat wave. For 45 minutes I have this window into which we dive in, where time doesn’t exist, and then we close it. And now emptiness takes over.
I don’t think the human psyche was prepared for that kind of thing. You’re not supposed to see someone you know by heart on video chat, after a long hiatus before closing the window like it’s just another window. Of course it feels like something wrong happened. Was that real? Do we really know each other? Am I fucking dreaming?
This morning it went from life on Crenshaw to finishing some music to video call with coworkers to news about Crenshaw to texting my dude who’s sending me his latest music (but rarely answers when I ask him how he’s doing, yeah I’m snitching bruh idc) to video call with my cousin who lives in “our” little village in France. She’s telling me about my foster family there and how where she works, a nursing home, they recently lost more than half of their patients. Nothing special, right?
I hang up, take all the news in. The human cost. What are families? Communities? The never-ending intricacies of *it all*. And now I’m exhausted. It’s a lot of emotions.
Let’s just say that I looked and sounded like that cat today.
