im not crying
the following events may or may not have happened
The link I got at 7AM on a Tuesday morning was for the video of the song I’m Not Crying by Flight of the Conchords. I was almost finished my college exams and had just woken up to a nine-message long tangent about a holiday he was about to go on with his family that meant that he wouldn’t be able to talk to me for a while but that he hoped I had a good summer, and LIL B, an internet rapper he had been obsessing about for the last six months. The week before, we had whispered phone conversations in the middle of the night about our dreams and our possible, imaginary future– and if we still knew one another, what we would name our cat. I told him I was allergic to cats, and he said that’s okay, we could get a short-haired one. We decided Vanya was a good name.
Two weeks later he sent me another link. It was to the song Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye. He was in Russia visiting his family, so he had no internet to talk to me but somehow managed to go to YouTube, find and share this song with me in our chat. I tried to figure out whether he was joking or not without asking what he meant. I wanted to know why he sent me this. Was he actually trying to say goodbye without saying the words? And if so, what kind of goodbye was needed if we were just internet friends? A goodbye really wasn’t necessary if he was just on holidays. I assumed it was a joke, but I didn’t ask because if I asked and if it was just a joke, I didn’t get it and mistook it for something deeper than it was.
In a short story by Lydia Davis I once read, a woman received a letter from her ex that contained a single poem written in French. It reminded me of the links I used to get which, like the letter, were presented without context. The woman was thrown into utter chaos. She resolves not to open the letter immediately but while she’s driving home, it’s all she can think about. She becomes unable to concentrate on the road; she gives in and pulls in on the busy highway and opens it. At first glance she’s baffled. She can’t make it out; she couldn’t read French. She continues her journey with furrowed brows, deep in thought about why she got a French poem, and why it was alone and why it had to be in French. When she gets home, she slowly translates it and what she uncovers she meticulously analyses. Over the next few days, she digs for context about their relationship within the verses. She studies its format, its sentence structure, its rime couèe, and obsessively tries to come up with an answer. She thinks about why she and her ex ended things, about their last moments together, and wonders what the French language has to do with it. She agonises over the phrases nous nous retrouvions, meaning ‘we will return to each other’, and compagnon de silence and insensès, ‘crazed people’. She rewrites these three phrases over and over again as if doing so would help her gain some kind of understanding.
She recalls the conversation they have that broke them up in the first place: he is caught cheating and tells her he believes they will return to each other in ten years. She says, “give it five” and he looks down and says nothing. Thus, ensues radio silence for a full year, right up until she receives his letter. She wonders if this means he misses her, or if for some reason he is too shy to speak his own words to her and this was his way of reaching out. Perhaps he just liked the poem and wanted to share it with her after all this time. She sniffs the page to see if it smells like him. It did not. She once again agonises over the meaning of the letter, wracking her brain for a simple explanation and by doing so makes things more complicated. She cannot find an answer by herself. She thinks maybe if she can’t find the answer maybe she should ask him in a reply, though this brings up a new set of fears; sending a response would mean acknowledgement to him that she read and thought about the letter more than he probably intended. She would not open herself up to that kind of questioning from him after all this time. She would stay quiet– maybe until another letter arrives but until then she would sit quiet and go about her life. In the end, she concludes that there is no conclusion. There is no tangible ending to a story that has been left hanging in animated suspension indefinitely. She may or may not have caught a whiff of his scent on the page, he may or may not have agonised over what to say in a letter to a person he cheated on and left hanging for an unspecified amount of time. There is no happy reunion to finish off, just confusion and unanswered questions. The end.
A month later, I received another string of messages. I had passed my exams at this point and read them on my break during a shift at the café I worked at for a summer job. His tone was anxious and elated. He had a new girlfriend, his first serious one. She was a runner and a language student. In a picture he sent of them together, I couldn’t help but notice that she looked almost exactly like me, down to her height and hair colour. I tried to ignore this, passing it off as a sheer coincidence and congratulated him. I went back to work, the meaning behind the songs gradually, unwillingly coming to light over the course of my shift. I left his response unopened for a full week.
Two weeks later I got a link to another song. Call Me Maybe, Carly Rae Jepsen.