Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The messages

These messages will not be in the book. The reproduction of messages are too overt. They leave nothing to the imagination. These messages are for me alone.

Dear E

It has bee three days since your last message. I fear you have found someone else, or a number of someones else as you are so fond of multi-tasking. Ah well, you may have moved on from our daily chatting but I have not. I have decided to keep bombarding you with messages. This is a mistake, of course. I know that girls should practice playing hard to get, but I have no time for it.

Today I listened to a piece of music that made me cry, Air on a G String, and yes, the ridiculous name just adds to it's poignancy. I listened to the Bach on my ipod. It was set to randomly sort through my library of songs. By chance, the Bach was sandwiched between "Debaser" by The Pixies and a track from my CD for learning French which taught me the French words for "I no longer love you. Please take your things out of my flat". It was not so muc the individual tracks but their placement, side by side that made them so poignant. The contrast between the Pixies and the Bach and the cold fury of the french language CD seemed somehow beautiful. I wanted to tell you immediately, but as you have not answered my last three messages I was not sure if I should make contact.

I am now readign Proust, and a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine. It is uncanny how similar these books are. I can move seamlessly between Way by Swann and Sleepwalking and Other Stories. Proust picks up where Tomine takes a breath.

Please answer this. Even just to say you will not answer this. You used to average 6 messages a day. Do you realise this? Three days break seems cruel.

Write
R
x

Dear E

I wondered what would happen if you had died. This does seem morbid of course, but two weeks is two weeks. I can only assume that 1. you are away, 2. you are in love, 3 I have offended you in some way 4. You have died.

If you had died your facebook account would remain active until some member of your family deleted it. Your status update would continue to say 'Evan: Progressive Fingerpicking' for at least a few weeks before your status cleared itself and waited for your return. Your wall would keep collecting messages from friends who didn't know that you had died asking where you are and why you haven't been in touch. There would be private messages bundling together and unread. You would fave 17 invitations to become a zombie or accept a hatching egg or to go to exhibitions and profit-share theatre shows and people's birthday parties.

You have made me wonder what happens to all those Facebook and Myspace accounts abandoned by dead people. I have the urge to track them down and gather them protectively. I would make art out of them, an exhibition of abanddoned social networks. People could walk quietly into a room filled with computers, each account would be like a eulogy. It would demand a kind of silence, like the exhibition of photographs of people who had just died that I saw in London.

Have you died? It feels like you might have. Talking to you like this in such a one-sided way makes me sad.

It is raining here.

I realise I have no friends.

All my friendship and some love,

R
x

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