Dearest Rachel –
There are certain aspects of my life where I follow in your footsteps, insofar as I can’t – and don’t – get rid of things, even in cases where I know I’m not going to use the things I’m keeping, To be sure, most of the things I hang onto (or maybe it’s just that I neglect to purge from my possession) are electronic in nature, sitting as data on one device or another, so they don’t take up space – and thus, they don’t cross my mind to get rid of. You wouldn’t believe (or maybe you would) how many television shows we used to collect for you to watch during the day that I can’t seem to bring myself to get rid of, even though I know I’m not going to watch them; it would just be too painful to do so on my own.
To a lesser extent (because they take up that much less space), I never get rid of text messages between myself and others. Hey, you never know when you’re going to hear from some people again. I still have a few texts from you, in fact, although, since you didn’t trust yourself with a smart phone (and considering what they’ve been doing to the general populace, you may have had a point), you didn’t text all that much, and the ones you sent were rather on the terse and clipped side… so, not very much like your conversational style. But I’ve kept them all the same, because they’re from you, don’t you know.
I should mention that I have pruned a few conversations from my phone. Thanks to my experiences dealing with dating apps, I’ve wound up deleting conversations and even blocking numbers from the worst offenders that I’d be absolutely out of my mind to give any further time of day to. At the same time, I’ve even kept a few such conversations – the really unhinged ones – to serve as a cautionary tale for me of what to look for and avoid in the future.
But as a rule, I don’t get rid of conversations with friends and other folks I have as named contacts. Heck, I’m pretty sure I still have a few conversations with Kevin archived on my phone, that I’m not going to get rid of, for reasons which should be obvious. That having been said, though…
About a month ago, there was a hurricane that blew through the Caribbean and up the eastern seaboard, threatening places like the Carolinas for a hot minute before apparently blowing itself out in the middle of the northern Atlantic. Normally, such stuff isn’t of much concern for me, unless I’m considering travelling to such a place (which I wasn’t). At the same time, it was news that I couldn’t get away from entirely, as I would be staring at the news while walking uphill on the treadmill in the gym.
What got my attention about it was that it shared a name with one of our mutual friends. It’s not often that one gets a hurricane named after one (although it’s more likely when your name begins with an earlier letter in the alphabet; neither you nor I could ever hope to have such an honor bestowed upon us), let alone one that reaches category 4 or 5 status and gets on the news. So the fact that this one was newsworthy prompted me to send a couple of messages to her, needling her – in jest, of course – about what she had against Puerto Rico and the Carolinas to be causing for much havoc over there. She appeared to take it in good humor, protesting complete innocence (although not ignorance – she claimed to “just want to visit” those places, and she meant them no harm)
I should mention this wasn’t my first time messaging her, either; while normally, most conversations among me and your old friends are in a group, there are the occasional contacts with each of them that don’t pertain to the others, and so I send texts to them on an individual basis, rather than clutter up the group chat. This little bit about the hurricane seemed like the sort of thing that didn’t require that level of group conversation, so I sent it to her directly.
Now I don’t think that I’ve come to associate her with storms or anything like that, but for some reason or another, when the rains blew up last night over the house, she came to mind for some reason. She’s known to participate in all manner of outdoorsy activities, and it occurred to me that she might have been caught out in it all. So I thought to text her and check as to whether she was…
…only to discover that, while she was in my phone’s contact list, and part of the group chat, whatever direct messages I’d ever made to her (and she’d sent back to me in reply) had disappeared, as if the conversations had never happened. It was as though she had been erased from my phone’s memory, along with whatever we may have said (however frivolous in hindsight). I’m almost certain I didn’t do this; is it possible that she could have done this remotely, by erasing them from her phone? Then again, that seems out of character for her, as well, so I’m at a bit of a loss as to what may have happened here.
I still sent the text, letting her know I was worried about her being caught in the rain, although with as light a tone as I could muster, given my perplexity about our texts disappearing like that. For all I know, she’ll have seen it appearing to pop up from an unidentified number and either ignored or reported it; it’s what I do these days, when I get such a text from out of the blue. It’s a shame to have lost all those old conversations, but I suppose we can’t be held to everything we typed once upon a time, long ago.
Anyway, I need to get going, honey, so I’ll talk to you later. For now, please keep an eye on me, and wish me luck; I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 