Did I ask you for a cake on my birthday? Of course not. I knew something like cake would be too much to handle for you. You’d first have to order, then drive to the bakery, pick it up, bring it to me, and pray dear God let chocolate be her favorite cake, which it’s not. I only wanted a handwritten card. Was that too much to ask? I wanted something to hold in my hands what you had held before, that caused you to turn over the words inside your head how best to pen them down. I wanted to feel the same difficult endeavor you underwent of saying something so banal in a moving novelty. Defy cliché. I wanted to guess which verbs you lost, admire and smile at the blithe then wobbly penmanship across the page. The choice of paper, the time and thought it took you, the color of ink that wrote my name and yours. I wanted to feel the careful pressure in my fingers opening the envelope you had sealed, like a child opening a wrapped gift, suppressing the jumpy eagerness at something so happily rare.
But an email? At 11:32 PM? What terrible things technology has done to you. I thought you knew better. I thought that you were different, that you’re this unabashedly old-fashioned person, but I guess that’s my impossible conjecture. Do you remember, there was a time when people took out a book, a newspaper from coat pockets, backpacks, and began reading, at airport terminals, subways, and I would silently gauge what they read from the titles and peeked passages. Now their sophisticated hands and ears and mouths and eyes are behind phones. Can you believe it? You’ve become one of them.
Books don’t look like books anymore. Letters don’t send like letters. Are you even the same person? (Yes, I know, you’re different yet the same.)
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