Hello?

Are you there?

Can you see me?

Can you hear me?

Sitting in front of my laptop screen, I lose my sense of my own body. I have no sense of your body. And worst of all, I have no sense of you sensing me.

And so I begin to doubt my own existence.

I can see you. Yes. I can hear you. Sort of.

But I can’t feel you.

Yet…

Now that you have been reduced to a portrait of yourself on screen, I find myself looking at your face with unrestrained attentiveness. I stare without your awareness censoring my gaze. I look for invisible signs of something, I don’t know what.

Strangely, this feels more intimate than a physical embrace.

In our current state, we are like ground control technicians communicating with astronauts hurtling into space.

There’s the same delay.
There’s the same low resolution picture and sound.
The same glitches. The same dropped frames.

And the flat tone of technical talk even when the house is on fire: Houston we have a problem. You’re muted. You’ve frozen. You’ve gone dark. I’ve lost my connection.

There is something poignant about the heroic efforts required of all of us to be able to communicate through the brutality of data loss.

It takes so much more courage to transmit. And it takes even more generosity to receive.