Long Silence in Return is Your Answer

With the advent of emails and texting, communication has been (almost violently) turned on its head.  Clearly, these new forms of communication and contact are spectacularly helpful in their immediacy.  At times, emailing or texting allows both sender and recipient time to fully process both message and response.

On the other hand, emails and texts can be overly cold.  The messages lack tone.  The newly emerging abbreviations sometimes seem cartoonish and often miss the beautiful cascading rhythms of a full sentence.  Consider the following:

I luv u.

I love you.

These two sentences may or may not be saying the same thing.  One might be playful and one is clearly not.  But what I have noticed more than anything, particularly with texting, is that if you reach out for honest contact, if  you extend an invitation, if you ask for help, if you ask to borrow, or if you ask to meet— long silence in return is your answer.

--Mitchell Hegman