Friday, 16 March 2012

Day 69, 16 March: Post Script: Breaking Free of Localized Love

Post Script: Breaking Free of Localized Love
[One of the flaws of writing an early blog is missing something. I missed a detail. And that detail evolved into a reflection.]
I called Katya today. On my £2 mobile phone. When I got to dialing, I stopped. It was a dreadful feeling to realize that I had forgotten my girlfriend’s phone number. I found it on my laptop, but in that moment of forgetting, there was a real sense of technological dependence and a lost touch with old forms of communication I used with friends and family back home. It was like I was forgetting part of her name. I was displaced in a different dialect of digits.
I heard her say ‘hi’, her naturally disarming tone she uses even when she doesn’t know who’s on the other line yet. I smiled to myself that she probably read the fifteen digit phone number and thought either wrong number or just maybe…me. It took maybe a second or several words between us to recognize each other’s voice. I want to say we recognized each other just before we said our names.
I felt an odd sense of freedom. I wasn’t in a chair. Or at a computer. Or at a desk—well, okay, I was standing up right next to the desk, but her voice was in my ear, not from earbuds or headphones, but from a tangible mobile phone. I could move around—and still hear her voice. It made me realize that our technological link of contact had been grounded for me in one spot for these months. I think of her, I see her, I talk to her at this same desk. Love has been localized, restricted, statically framed in a laptop monitor against the dynamic of her words and videos. Her memory is archived and recorded, her visual made of pixels, not cells. I talk to a moving picture on skype but I register the words, the gestures, the twirl of her hair, the laugh, the inflection and suddenly the composite can be no one other than Katya. The symphony of quirks is in harmony with the reality of her presence I can still call to mind.
      The phone call liberated me from the screen. From the localized love.
         I go to Dublin knowing the exact area codes to enable me to call her.
  And I will.

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