The body that copes with change.

There are certain people that even from across worlds and continents I know what is going on in their daily lives. Small emails and lines of poems cross over and run after themselves to reach and wind themselves between us. Titbits of things that I find that remind me of them - a latin american poem, a blog, being able to flick through an online album they've made. I speak with them on the phone as I sit in the bath. I time when it is that they'll be getting up. I know what classes they have that week - or what novel is next to their bed. I worry about confessions they're about to make, or living situations that they're dealing with. I wonder as to how their dissertation or first job is going. I know through my computer when one friend has arrived at work - and even if we don't speak I imagine him writing his university prospectuses in Egypt without even needing to speak. Others I can imagine in Santa Cruz, or teaching in Ecuador. Out of the blue their lives seem almost tangible. I can imagine them sat across the table from me - and they exist not only in a shut away memory of the last time we were together, but as initiators in my real daily life here. The small connections that occur every day bring their lives into conflict and integration with my own. They email my phone to let me know that they've had a nightmare and will I be home for a chat soon and as they talk fresh from waking up I drink my evening ocha with them. Another will leave me skype messages before they leave for work in Atlanta, continually chasing the opportunity to actually manage a skype chat. And amongst it all I feel touched and included by them. These connections are more fragile than face to face or eye to eye contact. Easier to lose. But somehow so beautiful for being so delicate.

There are also certain people who my life drifts far from. People that I miss with a burning curiosity and whose lives I cannot even imagine right now. They feel like whispers - dreamy two dimensional people - who become more like cardboard cut-outs the longer I am away from them. And when I think of them and miss them I think back to the last I heard of them and cannot quite conceive of where they have moved from that point. Figures that are over generalisations of their former selves. And although I know that that is part and parcel of the way the body copes with being uprooted and flung into a new situation I find this changing remembrance of people difficult - as though a part of yourself is being robbed from you, and along with it many people who you once loved.