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By Rhys Pearce, The Youth Outlook Staff Writer
The phone rings, and I sigh, because it reminds me of two things I’d rather forget. I don`t
want to answer the phone and I am absolutely going to anyway.
“Hello?” she says when I click the green button. I`m not sure why she still calls me. I`m not
sure why I still answer. We had a good time, once. And then we had a bad time; an excruciating, heart-rending time. I guess, in the past after the past we share, it used to be that speaking to her reminded me of the former. But lately, it reminds me of the latter. Suddenly, I realize that at the moment, life reminds me of the latter. The isolation, the waiting, and the hope for something greater, something by-gone that may yet return.
“Hi,” I say, bracing myself for any sign of her latest internet-inspired, anxiety-fuelled
conspiracy theory.
“Dude, I`m freaking out right now.” Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
“Why?” I force myself to say.
“I just watched this movie. Contagion. It`s exactly like everything that`s going on now!” This
vaguely confuses me, as I was unaware the New World Order had an acting career. Then she continues. “This proves that they knew it was going to happen! This was their plan all along, this is stage one: depopulation. This is the Beginning of the End.”
Well, I must admit, I was not expecting that. “Are you kidding me? Haven`t you seen the
news? Boris had it, only to be saved by the immigrant staff working for the NHS he defunded.
He nearly died of irony.”
“You seriously believe that?” she asks. I can almost hear the implication that I should know
better.
“Yes.”
“I used to be like you,” she sighs as if the age gap of 1 year and 4 months - to the day -makes me some sort of child. As if the distance between 15 and 17 is like the mythical Atlantic ocean before the discovery of the Americas. There is a long pause, during which I simply breathe into the phone, the air spiraling out from my emotional state. It doesn’t take her long to recognize. She`s familiar with the noise, I suppose.
“Are you crying?”
“No. Not right now. I was.” The admission hangs in the air, the subsequent question
unspoken.
A beat passes. “How familiar are you with the New York City water supply system?” I ask.
“Why?”
“Just something I was reading this morning. Apparently, water is fed into the city by pipes
that were built into 1842, and are now they are falling apart. They`re held together by the
pressure of the water rushing through them.” I pause, then- “Don’t you ever feel like that? Like the only reason you`re still moving forward is the fact that the world is still turning underneath you?”
I can imagine her on the other side of the phone, her face expressing the belief that I`m
positively insane, though she doesn`t say anything to that effect, or anything at all. I continue.
“And... I don’t know, I just woke up ten minutes ago and I held my own face, and ... it was
like I could feel the weight of the whole world in my hands. The full force of everything bearing down on me.”
As I hear myself say that, I wonder who, really, is the crazy one here. She doesn’t say
anything for a while and then goes back to talking about 5G towers and vaccines. I really have to block her number sometimes. A lyric goes through my head, from a song I used to listen to once upon a time: “Why are you so far away from me? / I need help and you`re way across the sea.” When I first heard it, I related it to her. Not anymore, of course, now it applies to someone very different, as far as I`m concerned. But at that moment, I think it applies to everyone. To everyone I`ve ever met and ever will meet, to a friend, foe, and frenemy. I think of Emily Dickinson, and listening to the tiny voice of the phone forecast the apocalypse, I think she was wrong.
A Lifetime is a sea,
between everything and me.
With them would nothing be.
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