S I L E N C E

He said he was going to call. She said she would get back to me. They said they would let me know at the end of the week.

S I L E N C E…..

All week I have had my friends and family calling me with stories of silence. Stories of waiting, anxiety, empty message boxes, unlit phone screens, unanswered DM’s and all of the subsequent stomach clenching, excuse making, fear inducing emotions that comes with waiting to hear from someone and having to sit in that silence. It was a theme that I could not ignore and got me thinking about what it means to have integrity in today’s world of being over in touch and under committed.

I have this old high school friend that I have been running into for just over a year here in my small mountain town. She is the only person I know that calls me by my last name. She screams it out as if she has not seen me in years wherever and whenever we meet and at a volume used only by auctioneers and cheering sports fans. Her mouth is too large for her face in a way that adds to her features but takes the eyes a bit of time to adjust. She always makes me smile both during our encounters and after. I smile initially at the sound of my last name being bellowed, ‘REED’, she yells from down the trail or across the parking lot. I smile after because of the last sentence that she says every time we go to say goodbye, ‘we should meet up soon and….- insert whatever type of sport is being enjoyed in that season-, ‘hit the trails, hit the ski hill, hit up the river’, (you get the point). ‘ I’ll totally reach out to you soon’. And with that her and I embrace, fondly because we actually really do enjoy one another, we say our goodbyes and we walk in opposite directions. She has never reached out. I have never reached out. We will never reach out. Silence. What gives me the most entertainment about this continued fake plan making is that it now seems like the only socially acceptable way for us to end our encounters. What if we just stopped making these fake plans, then what? Could we just end with great to see you, have a nice day? Yes, we totally could. Why don’t we, why can’t she just let our ‘friendship’ be what it is, something to be left on trails, sidewalks, dog parks and strictly up to fate? Clearly for her she needs to let me know that she really would like to spend some actual time with me, she just never will, she is never going to commit to it and she has no intention of following up- there truly is not a farewell that captures this all in a neat little package. So instead she leaves me in the final moments of the air between us with a good old solid lie. And yes it is a lie.

Don’t we do this all the time? I’ll give you a call, message you later with a plan, maybe I will pop by, yes, that would be great I’ll see you there, oh its no problem I’ll get in touch, we should totally go and grab a drink soon, oh sorry I did not see that message, and on and on it goes. I have been guilty of all of the above spoken as an honest lie. I know I am never going to follow through, or that I am out right lying about my intention to follow up but this feels gentler and nicer then the truth. The truth being: I am not coming to your party, sorry I would rather spend the night alone with a glass of wine and netflix, I am not going to message you back because I do not like you that much and after our first date I just can not be bothered, I want to pop by but I do not like you enough to make that a priority, I have overextended myself in life, I have no intention of ever hanging out with you socially but I like to run into you, I did see your message I just did not respond for many reasons and none. And the cycle continues only now in today’s land of walking, phone addicted zombies, and flashing, pinging, pavlovs dogs inducing tech we all have a million more ways to tell a million little lies about our intention to commit, our intention to show up and do what we say we are going to do. We have all seemed to accept that the idea of integrity in this land is something as rare and precious as a unplanned Sunday afternoon, or a dinner party without the distracted glow of someones cell phone.

Then there is a whole other level of silence and integrity, the silence of saying nothing at all and the lack of integrity that goes with leaving someone in your wasteland of silence. I dated this man for a few months last year. Oh, I liked him so. I wanted to do all the things with him and then do them again. When he was over, time in our bubble was magic. We would jump from subject to subject each with a new level of energy and excitement that gets built between two people who have the same chemistry of conversation. He would stand on the opposite side of my island, his brown eyes glowing, a cheeky grin on his face, red wine glass in hand and regale me with stories and snippets of his day. I would stand opposite, baiting him with an endless amount of questions and anecdotes, insights and wisdom. I thought he was magic. We would do this for hours until it was time for bed lost in both time and each others words. The next morning he would leave my apartment. Just before the door would shut, without fail he would always say, ‘talk to you soon’. I would shut the door walk up the stairs grinning and feeling all ooey gooey in airy crush land. I would turn on the shower, still vibrating in the after glow of a great night, towel off, do some work and later in the day because he was on my mind, as he was for the better part of 2019 I would message him. And so it would begin. Silence. The first day it was manageable this silence, I would have thoughts like, ‘well I know he had this and this to do today and he mentioned he had a friend coming into town so he is probably just busy’, then day two would be more along these lines, ‘maybe he did not get my message, it snowed yesterday and he was probably up on the mountain the whole day so maybe he just missed it’, the third day would be ‘I can’t believe he has not massaged me back, what an asshole, I am not going to do this anymore, fuck it’. And then he would message. Never when he said he would, never regularly enough to let me off my guard, and always punctuated with just enough silence to spin me into the above cycle…. again and again. I liked him, and in those three words there are thousands of layers of all the things that go along with asking someone into our hearts so I allowed this cycle to go far longer then I want to admit both on these pages and to myself. Of course I was in a particular dreamy cycle of being interested in someone who was woefully emotionally unavailable which is a whole other book of short stories in itself, but what his silence taught me is how cruel it can be to say nothing at all.

I have no conclusions to draw on here, no pieces of wisdom or advice. All I have is what it feels like to hear my friends tell me about their stories of silence, of waiting to hear back, of the subsequent stories made in the absence of someone not following through with what they said they were going to do. The whys, and the maybes, the hope that turns into hopelessness, the resulting mystery that remains from an unanswered email, a un replyed to text, a date suggested never to be followed up on. As I write this I know I am guilty of the above, of all of the above and if someone is reading this and I have done this to you, I am sorry. If integrity is all that remains at the end of ones life then we all better hope that this measure changes in our lifetimes or that we start to show up from a place of integrity first, popularity and people pleasing second.