Sent from my iphone, a strangely charged olive branch.
I was at the grocery store the other day, doing some domestic shit I had put off because I have been scrambling to redevelop my MA thesis and had to essentially shelf the last academic year of theoretical readings on shamanism. I threw a few tantrums and moved on.
Sometimes I feel like I am indebted to the forces that be, most times I don’t even know how I make it all happen, those are the times I fall back to the practice of gratitude. I don’t mean some hoyti-toity supernatural soul-gasm. I just try to take a breath, look around, and remind myself I am okay. I am okay.
As I exited the store and strolled to my car to dump my groceries in the back, I heard my phone annoyingly ding and remembered I didn’t have it on mute, like I usually do. I got in the front seat, took off my mask and sanitized my hands. I pulled my phone out and saw a notification for an email. The name was familiar, but I hadn’t read it in years.
The subject of the email was an emoji heart. A pink heart emoji with little vibrational wings, to be precise. I thought maybe it was spam. I clicked it open anyways and proceeded to read the enclosed text.
Well, text is a heavy word for what this was, it’s more like I read the one paragraph, run on sentences, with shoddy grammar that could have been written on the shitter. Now, that is not to say pretty prose cannot be produced while taking a dump, but this sure smelled of shit to me.
My favorite content part was the line, “life is short.” If you have had any type of interaction with me, you know I cannot fucking stand clichés. Please, fuck off with your unoriginal thought or inability to express something in your own god-damn words. Not to mention how easily one could retort with, all the more reason to not fill it with assholes.
But the part where my eyes bulged out was the “sent from my iphone” signature. A thumbed apology, short and shallow. A mother fucking dangling clause, modifying zero context. I haven’t spoken to you in years. We grew up together, but I would no longer say we are related, that takes relation, and we haven’t had any of that for a long time.
People with porous boundaries think they can trash your character, rifle through your personal life, and treat you disrespectfully. Then they repent their sins (with zero remorse served with a side of gas-lighting) and craft the word love poorly into a sentence and all is forgiven.
Don’t even come at me with that bullshit. The depths of trauma grooves say otherwise. The requirements of even getting to hear the sound of my voice are far too much work for people like you to fathom. You don’t invest in the cumbersome, even though that’s the underbelly of relationships. And love, love is a verb, love is done, not said. Now that this little blog is longer than the strangely charged olive branch, *Class Dismissed*.
