Communication:

PLEASE WRITE, DON'T PHONE.


The phone rings and rings and Annie does not move. She counts the rings knowing that after the sixth but before the seventh, her answering machine will click on and she will hear the generic female voice recite her phone number, say she is unavailable, and to please leave a message.

She steels herself hoping it is a telemarketer, PBS, or the bug man, but of course, it’s Jake.

“Annie, please pick up,” he says. “We really need to talk about this.” There’s a pause and she can hear the moment when he goes from pleading to frustration by the way he breaths. Right about now he will be pursing his lips and puffing up his cheeks to blow out a long blast of air. He has told her that this blowing out calms him, helps him to focus, but Annie believes it’s an announcement of coming events, possibly anger.

And sure enough his next words are, “Damn it, Annie! You’re being incredibly childish. Avoiding talking to me won’t make things any easier.”

Annie drifts across the living room away from the machine, towards the big picture window and thinks, “Oh yes, it will.” She keeps her back to the phone and whispers the words to her self as though he might hear.

He talks on, berating, cajoling, demanding for another two minutes. Doesn’t he know that he can’t manipulate a machine?

When they are face to face or even talking on the phone, he just goes on and on, throwing words at her so fast she has no time to think. He’s always been quicker at this verbal sparring than she. By the time she’s thought of a response to his first statement, he’s ten sentences beyond her and she can’t catch up. She can never catch up.

She listens to the silence for a while and then goes to her desk and jiggles the mouse to bring her computer screen to life. She clicks on email and then ‘write message’, the comforting white screen pops up and she rests her fingers on the keyboard. Taking a deep breath, she types in “Dear Jake.” Then she stares out the window at the big pine tree across the street and watches a family of quail cautiously cross the road.

Annie highlights the words she has just typed and hits the delete button and they disappear. She types in “Jake”, comma, “I need to tell you how I feel.” She will type and edit, read and delete and then type some more before she has told him that she feels bruised, crowded, and manipulated. She will stare out the window again; save her words to draft and go into the kitchen for another cup of coffee before she is satisfied that these are her truest words, her feelings spelled out without interruption or confusion.

And she will read the finished draft many times before she can hit the send button with no anger in her heart. But that’s all right, because in this comfortable white space, this written medium, she finally has what she had needed all along -- all the time in the world.