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Disconnect
June 10th, 2018
I’ve been talking to a dead phone all year.
I didn’t hear those concluding tones
or the mechanical click,
so I kept rambling:
misinterpreting loss of reception for
undivided attention.
The uninterrupted sincerity of
proclamations, explanations, and apologies
will forever go unreceived.
I could never tell when anything was
read:
the latest notifications weren’t the first to stop at
delivered.
I began typing potential texts into my notes,
taking to other apps to know how the day went.
Scrolling through her favorites like it’s my
timeline.
The algorithm
picked up on the aftermath of absence.
We always disagreed on the ideal beach,
but I’m still upset over not being
invited
to the most recent visit.
Reduced to a social media witness.
Reaching out is useless:
I take too much time to finalize on a clean-enough
selfie.
The filter forced upon me:
a locked-out black screen.
That’s how I killed our snap streak -in flawless cruelty- I was once told,
our relationship is through a
phone,
and by the time I sorely attempted letters,
the ink went dry.
I could make the excuse it’s invisible,
or admit I quit trying to
reply.
It doesn’t matter if we’re too mad to
call back.
We’re too far away for a
charger to fix this...
because if it were all through a phone, better WiFi would’ve continued the conversation,
and we’d only be at odds over the hilarity of memes,
meaning our greatest hour of honesty since New Years
was saying goodbye without a
sent
sign.
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