The Letter I Was Too Lazy to Write

the letter i was too lazy to write said

i’m at the point again of wanting

 to turn off my cell phone

to turn my back on texting

to refuse to hear the phone’s pings

everyone insists texting, like email,

is quick time, almost real time

especially if it’s globe to globe smart to smart sun to sun

they remind like a nagging never-can-do-wrong mother

you need that phone for emergencies

& anyways (oh, how I detest that extra “s” after the “y” on “anyway”)

the wifi signal is as rapid as your blinking eye

i ruined two, three phones since '03

& each time got a handy secondhand

that would do the job of instant connect

i reconstructed my directory

but each time i did, oh woe,

i lost what i truly wanted to keep

not the vital practical life-or-death contacts

but the messages

that reminded me where i was

on a special christmas morning when

my happily dysfunctional family,

the sort afflicted with the optimism bias,

was together in one place

or where i was on another day when i was ill

& again near the edge of despair

when i was soaked with rain & stranded

in a remote dark part of myself

when i was in a bus & the conductor fed a DVD

of a B movie called “the losers”

at an ungodly time when all i had were

jingling coins in my purse & an ingrained faith

that this situation will pass

ahhh those messages were messengers

from the abyss in the sky

somewhere in one of those roving satellites

an autobot has read how

an earth woman early today texted

“good a.m. are we on for 10 a.m. mtg 2day?”

the letter i was too lazy to write

will tell you i’ll have none of that

for the meantime

i’m at an alternative spa 

for the techno-weary

having my brain re-wired

into improving the sprawling penmanship

that has increasingly lost its legibility

two months ago a student came up to tell me

with only the honesty a child can muster

“teach, your handwriting is like

a doctor’s prescription”

the time to listen more to myself think has come

the time for longer pauses has arrived

letters allow for lengthy pauses 

 

not measured in quick time

before the ballpoint pen resumes

its up-down movement across a page

how silly i was to imagine a text

or even an email, no matter how drenched

in emotion, can replace that?

from hereon

you’re gonna hear from me

but give it a waiting time of two weeks

~ Babeth Lolarga

May 15, 2012

6:22 a.m.

Photo of flowers and notebook from the WorldWideWeb.