Let’s ghost people
✓✓
It is a very efficient way to end a relationship. Where we once walked home together, I now skip past the meeting place, stick my earbuds in and make the journey back by myself. Where we once met up during breaks, I now deliberately avoid, staying cooped up in my office and working on reports that aren’t due until next next Friday. Where we once roamed the halls and talked about all things under the sun, recent breakups, crushes, notable events in our separate workspaces, I stand at stare at the deserted corridors. Absolutely nothing tugs at my chest.
Sometimes, I feel like an actual ending, something like a “Goodbye, we can’t be friends anymore” would leave less lingering memories than just deciding not to show up. But then, I’m a coward. Not showing up, or leaving someone on read, or refusing to meet up with one word: “Busy”, well, it doesn’t actual mean that the relationship has definitely ended. The subject is avoided and the friendship remains in stasis. Schrodinger’s friends: they are both estranged and not until they are observed. In this case, it’s more like until they decide to talk about it.
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I’ve never been good at “talking about it” and I suspect most people are the same way. After all, who wouldn’t just rather leave and ignore the problem for as long as possible? Because, sometimes, they really do resolve on their own. Eventually, one of the friends reaches out and the other responds, and all is well. The bridge has been crossed without any stray planks loosening and plunging into the valley below. But what if nobody reaches out? Not a word. Just conspicuous glances whenever we’re in the same room, while the other stares at the floor, the walls, anywhere but those eyes.
Just like every decision in one’s life, it can go horribly wrong or amazingly right. It is a form of silent treatment, except one also extricates their body and attention from the other until soon, nothing is left but a husk. A stranger where a companion or a lover once was. The slow crumbling of a relationship, stacks upon piles of dusty memories eroding, shaken, the little grey particles disintegrating into the air. Coating the floor that I’ll scuff my boot with once every so often, looking back on that decision, on the ruins of someone I used to know.
The dust could sit there undisturbed for years, or with one quick sweep like gathering stardust after a supernova, squeezing and tugging and creating a whole new star from the remnants of a dead one. Just one message or one full mind to go over and say “Hey”, which could be ignored or accepted enthusiastically, is enough to undo the spell and set everything right. Like a paper towel rubbing the laminated photos, grime and dirt peeling off like dried acrylic, your smiling faces peering up, the background an indecipherable blur. For it doesn’t matter where you are.
What matters is that you’re together when observed.
