Every Seventh Wave Read Free Page B

form and content of what you say, only to how you say it. I want to SEE you talk, Leo. I want to SEE you listen. I want to SEE you breathe. After all this time of close, intimate, auspicious, measured, endless and yet curtailed, fulfilled and unfulfilled virtual reality, I’d just like to actually, finally set eyes on you. That’s all.
    Seven minutes later
    Re:
    I hope you’re not going to be disappointed. Because I don’t LOOK particularly exciting, neither when I’m talking, nor when I’m listening, and certainly not when I’m breathing. (I’ve got a cold.) But that’s what you wanted; you were the one who wanted us to meet.
    Three hours later
    Subject: ??
    Have I said something wrong (again)? Have a nice evening.
    Leo
    The following day
    Subject: Scared
    Good morning, Emmi. Yes, I’m scared. I’m scared that what I’ve meant to you (and maybe what I still mean to you) will evaporate the moment you set eyes on me. You see, I think that my on-screen words read better than my face looks when it utters them. You might be shocked when you discover who it is you’ve spent two years wasting all those words and feelings on, and what kind of feelings they were. That’s what I meant when I wrote yesterday, “But that’s what you wanted; you were the one who wanted to meet up.” I hope you understand me now. If I don’t get another reply from you, then see you tomorrow.
    Leo
    Five hours later
    Re:
    Yes, I do understand you now; you’ve made yourself beautifully clear. When it’s been about “us,” you’ve always talked exclusively about what you might mean to me , and in fact you still do. Because that’s how you measure how much I might mean to you . In other words, if you mean a lot to me, I mean something to you. If you mean little to me, I mean nothing to you. My physical being is superfluous as far as you’re concerned, and so you don’t especially feel the need to meet me in person, which is why you’re not exactly enthusiastic about being forced into it either. Because whoever and whatever I really am meant nothing and still means nothing to you. But back to your fear, perhaps I can put your mind at rest: what you mean to me is well on the way to evaporating, even before we meet (that’s a poorly constructed sentence!). What you look like won’t matter in the slightest, my dearest.
    Ten minutes later
    Re:
    I think we’d best forget our meeting, my dearest.
    Twenty seconds later
    Re:
    Yup, let’s forget it. You might as well re-activate your out-of-office message, my dearest.
    Ten minutes later
    Re:
    All my fault. I should never have replied to you after Boston.
    One minute later
    Re:
    All my fault. I should never have written to say that lights were on in flat 15 at three in the morning. What has it got to do with me? Oh, by the way, in case you were getting what you mean to me out of all proportion, I just happened to be passing in a taxi.
    Two minutes later
    Re:
    You’re right, my lights have nothing to do with you, but I admit it was very kind of you to want to help me keep my electricity bill down. For the record—even if this is a meaningless comment now—you can’t tell whether the lights are on in flat 15 from a taxi.
    One minute later
    Re:
    O.K., so maybe it was a double-decker bus, or a propeller plane. From where we now stand it’s irrelevant. Night-night!
    Seven hours later
    Re:
    In case you haven’t just flown past, tonight the lights are on again in flat 15. I can’t sleep.
    Ten minutes later
    Subject: Meaningful stuff
    Let me get this clear, Emmi.
    1) What you mean to me means at least as much to me as what I mean to you.
    2) It’s precisely because you do mean so much to me that it means a lot to me that I might also mean a lot to you.
    3) If you hadn’t meant so much to me, it wouldn’t have mattered to me how much I mean to you.
    4) But as it does