Schrödinger’s Text Message

What is it to burn a bridge? Do we build a relationship back up out of the ashes, creating a new friendship with an old friend like a phoenix – valuable, dynamic, with a well of existing knowledge? Or do we move on with our lives, borne ceaselessly against the current of progress, against endless new people from work or hobbies or friends-of-friends, against our own changing self, not the same as we were last year? Friendship, to me, is deserving of effort and energy, and in a busy modern world, are we constantly burning bridges because we don’t have enough to give to the people we value?

In a post-pandemic* world, we’re looking at a year and a half where we haven’t been seeing people, haven’t been spending money in the same way, and we haven’t been travelling. For many of us, we’ve had the occasional zoom or skype with friends, but our relationships have changed in the absence of doing something together – dance classes, worship groups, school-gate pickups, all these ordinary moments of friendship no longer exist, and chatting has become its own event, scheduled and . In some ways, this has given us greater access to friendship – my friends in Italy, China, and America are now just as reachable as my friends in the same city as me, and I have really loved connecting with them. On the other hand, it’s made friendships that were easy before feel like work – we can’t just head to a bookstore or a coffee shop together, and I have to be interesting even on days when I have nothing to share. There are no prompts in skype world, and sometimes it feels like you need to have a reason to call – even when both parties are probably looking for a reason.

Relationships have been changing for years now. When my parents left high school or graduated from university, to keep in touch with a friend was an endeavour requiring regular phone calls or letters. It was accepted, if not acknowledged, that people fell out of touch, and you wouldn’t know squat about their lives. Now, though, in an age of social media, people you were once close to update you in the same way they update their close friends and family. You know intimate details about their life, even when you haven’t spoken in years, and you find yourself hurt when you’re not invited to the wedding of somebody from high school or talking about ‘my friend’s kid’ as if you’ve ever met them. Add in Covid, a period when even the people in our lives at present weren’t there, and it’s no wonder that we don’t know who our friends are or how we want our relationships to look.

One of my favourite things about friendship in the modern age is that you never know who is going to respond to you – and in my experience, it is often not who you expect. This is the benefit of social media – your posts are accessible to everyone who has ever been in your circle, and you never know who will respond. My friends are, by and large, a disparate set – whilst I have developed a group often, as different circumstances present themselves, and the people who have remained in my life tend to be just one person from the group. I don’t know how I can value these people, except maybe by making a list and speaking to one person a week for the next year-and-a-half. That kind of routine seems psychotic when applied to something as mellifluous and unpredictable as friendship, and potentially unrewarding as we all know that relationships are not a box-check exercise.

Instead, I am halfway through a series of messages across a number of platforms, drafting but not sending missives to people across London and the world, trying to work out if I can ask to meet or travel to them, if I should rain-check and say ‘can we pick up life again in a year’, if I should be video-calling them – and if I even have time to IM chat if they respond. I don’t want to burn bridges, but I lead a busy life and I don’t know how to balance all the people I care about, except equal-opportunities ignoring everyone, which is not a viable solution. In Schrödinger’s text message, you’re communicating and not at the same time, writing a message but not sending it, sure you want to say something but unsure of what method to use to say it.

There is a Chinese saying – to attract good fortune spend a new coin on an old friend, share an old pleasure with a new friend, and lift up the heart of a true friend by writing his name on the wings of a dragon. This seems to me to be the secret to friendship, and it’s the attitude we should take into the post-pandemic world – show generosity to our old friends, give time to new friends, and show our best friends that we value them with words and actions that last. That’s how I’ll be as society tentatively re-opens – not burning bridges, but writing on dragon wings.

*I am aware that the world is not really post-pandemic, but it’s a shorthand phrase for ‘our government doesn’t care so we’re all going to restaurants again’.

On This Topic:

• How to maintain a friendship – it has a handy acronym and a worksheet!
• Somebody to talk to without offloading only negativity to your friends
• Yes, I quoted the basic thing. So sue me. It’ll only take you a few hours to read it if you never have.

To-Do:

• Pitch for the thing with S. C.
• Fresh water for flowers.
• Get out emergency cash since you spent your last bit.

Today’s Culture:

• Finding new stuff on Disney Plus. I’ve mostly been focussed on the movies, but Owl House?? Golden Girls?? Atlanta?? This is fantastic.
• Halloween Pusheen is adorable, have you seen him???
• Summer is ending, hot water bottle season begins. Live in luxury. Get yourself a hot water bottle.