Once, on a hike, when we sat under some trees to eat our fruit, a friend asked me a question that required a detailed answer. I started answering him while he was still digging go out his snack. His eyes were focused on me. He was listening.
He’s a good listener, nodding in the right places, asking questions, laughing.
Then his phone came out of the bag and he glanced down at it. I think some messages had come in and they’d caught his attention. He still nodded and made the right listening noises, but very soon afterwards, I lost him.
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You probably think I need to choose better friends to go hiking with, but I do generally try to spend time with quality people, and he is quality people.
This oddness, this fading out, was very unusual for him.
At the beginning, I faltered on a for a while, thinking he would come back. Then I purposefully stopped mid-sentence to see whether he would notice that I’d stopped talking.
He didn’t.
I ate my naartjie and listened to the forest sounds. The best part of a hike is, for me, the part where you stop to eat your snack and listen to the noisy silence.
I wondered whether he would, when he recovered from his phone-induced daze, remember that there was a story he’d been interested hearing.
He didn’t. After half a hour, in which I don’t think he noticed his snack or the birdsong, we packed up and went on again.
We can, of course, conclude that my story was boring, or that the delivery lacked verve. ‘Concise’ is not a word one could use to describe my relationship with speech. But, because he and I have a very long friendship based on very long stories in which we partner one another like a crack team, I doubt the fault was mine.
It’s just the phone.
The fucking phone.
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