Luco & the Cellphone

I bought this cellphone so that my friends and I could keep in touch. I hoped that it would more firmly tether me to them. That if they knew they could at any time contact me, then I would feel perhaps more like a constancy in their life. The cellphone would bind me to them, them to me.

After awhile though, my friends stopped calling. Some said this was because of my voice on the phone - they said I sounded half-asleep, as though they'd just awoken me, but I was too polite to say so. Others said that every time they spoke to me, they had to be alone to cry for several hours. And once they stoppepd calling and started texting, they'd say things like "LOLZ, Bro, chill out." To which I'd respond with something in the vein of "LMFAO because we are all going to die one day." Then they'd text back something like "Whoa, creepy man. You are one creepy cat." To which I would respond, "I speak only the truth, my sibling in mortality."

Now no one even texts me anymore. Sometimes I give my phone number to telemarketers just to hear it ring. But this is foolishness. Why do I desire to be connected to the others in my life? Why tighten the cords that bind us together? This was my original desire, but was it an intelligent one? We are all united in the most important, most fundamental way; we all live to die alone, together. And if I keep myself too close to my "friends," then when they do die, part of me will be obliterated along with them. A partial demise because I will have become so close to them that a piece of my own heart will cease to exist when they do.

My cellphone reminds me that my friends will die.