Time to get a watch ⌚️
Your phone: a constant reminder of your unrequited love.
Write me back
I never set my watch because My cellphone tells the time as well And since it knows when last we spoke My cellphone has this double role: To calculate the hours elapsed Between one clock check and the next And calculate the anxious hours Wasted waiting for your text.
Explanation
Your cellphone has replaced your watch. Or, if you have a smart watch, your cellphone first replaced your watch, then became your watch.
Either way, you now know both the time, and whether your crush has texted you back. When you take your phone out of your pocket, you might justify it by telling yourself you are checking the time, but really, you are also checking if anyone cares about you.
I do not think it is wise to give your various messaging apps unlimited access to your face. That isn’t to say I don’t do it—actually I do it all the time. If I am looking for social reassurance, I will obsessively check Insta, Facebook, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, normal sms, email—to say nothing of phone calls. (I am honestly probably forgetting a few channels.)
Can you imagine that, 200 years ago, you could literally only talk to someone in person or by letter? Were people more chill then, or did they hang out by their mail boxes anxiously waiting for their crush’s letter to arrive by pigeon? Let me know in the comments.
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Lesson
Get a watch! A real one. I have a Seiko and a Nordgreen, and I love them both. Limit the amount of exposure your face gets to your phone.
Poem stats
8 lines
Iambic tetrameter
Rhyme scheme: ABCB DEFE
in the heyday of letterwriting and modern post (london/paris, 18th/19th/early 20thC eg.) when letters could be exchanged three times a day, i think it was very common to have a borderline-2022 anxiety and neurosis about letter communication. Louis XIV wielded a lot of political power by controlling the post, famously employing servants to open and read hundreds of letters and relay to him the movements of his enemies. In proust, charles swan holds unopened letters up to the light to spy on their contents, waits at home all day for letters, sneaks over his lover's window late at night to listen for her infidelity when her letter claims she's unwell, and the narrator later develops iPhone-levels of paranoia relating to letters, phone calls (his bourgeois family has one of the first telephones in paris), and the gamut of epistolary communicating...
The brevity of the poem matches the anxiousness of the poem. Are you there? Do you think of me too? I imagine it is the desire to be known, to be loved that causes the need to check. I liked this poem very much, Torben.