THOUGHTS ON PAPER CUPS & STRINGS.

To you, out there,

I’ve been thinking a lot about you – you became such a huge part of my collective memory. We did so much together. When I run, I think of you. When I close my eyes before I sleep, I think of you. When I hate myself for not being pretty enough, I think of you – and how you told me you’d love me old, young, 200 lbs larger, or through any disaster. When I drink coffee, I think of you. When I dance, I think of you, and that room that we would dance in every night with your favorite electric blue lights that shined just enough to let me see your smile. And then I laugh thinking about how we got yelled at for staying in that room every night too late, because the security man outside felt uncomfortable that I was there since I didn’t work there.  I think of how we built an imaginary future together. It was so detailed that I feel like I lived it in another life. And, I try to think myself out of thinking of you, but it doesn’t work.

And all this thinking makes me wish that we could transmit our thoughts on cups and strings, you know like little kids learn to make in science class, so that every time I think of you, you would know, and then maybe you wouldn’t be so mad at me for thinking that I never thought about you after I left.

And,  it would also be good to have it for friends who exist in different cities and across realities, because sometimes every one is so caught up in what their doing that we don’t have time to pick up a phone and say, “Hello out there, I’m thinking about you” but we are thinking about the people we care about.

Your cup on a string would be so full of my thoughts that it would break and I’d have to send you a new cup every day, or maybe I would attach multiple strings with different thought processes, so that at least all my thoughts wouldn’t run on one wire and become too powerful to serge through at once.  And if there were multiple strings they would be categorized like this: a string for memories, and a string for new possibilities, and a string just to say, “I CARE ABOUT YOU” all the time, and a string for feeling sorry, and also for feeling happy that everything happened.

Even with all the technology in the world, I could never convince you that I thought about you when we weren’t talking, but if you could hold a cup half way across the world with a string attached to it then maybe you’d know that I did and do love you, and that I will continue to think about you until the end of time.