Illustration by Stephanie Barahona.
Sometimes there’s no time for writing. Like there’s time for writing notes and lists and emails and texts, but there’s no time for Writing. Sometimes there’s not even time for writing notes and emails and texts and stuff like that. When that happens I don’t open new text messages so the green dot thing stays next to the text and I know which ones I haven’t replied to. I also put my emails into an Action folder in Gmail to “deal with later”. On Facebook, I don’t open the messages so that the light blue colour tells me which ones I haven’t looked at yet. Sometimes I open them and don’t reply and because they’re no longer light blue I forget that I haven’t replied and then I email people 7-9 days later in a panic.
Sometimes, this happens with texts as well.
It’s harder with an iPhone than with an old Nokia because you can see all the unanswered texts stacked on top of each other in that light grey colour. When you forgot on the Nokia, you didn’t have to remember again. Sometimes I go to text somebody about something and then I see all their light grey texts sitting in a pile. When that happens I often don’t text them the thing I wanted to, but then I often don’t reply to their messages either. I feel guilty about all of this. I feel guilty about a lot of things. I don’t know whether this is a piece of Writing or just me writing about whom I need to write to. I think the list right now is something like: Hannah, Dean, Bill, Bimo, Marty, Jeff, Diana, Nona, Yaya and Pop (but they are always on the list even if I’ve just written to them), Aitak, Kelly, Mohini (?) I also need to write a document for the Department of Immigration for Max and Alexe. In it I need to give details of their relationship, whether I think they are committed, in love, if I invite them to events individually or as a couple, what they think about multiculturalism etc. Alexe FB messaged me about this and I replied but then I forgot to do the thing she asked. It’s been more than 7-9 days since this happened.
