old notes/the moment maya slips into realtime.txt


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the moment maya slips into realtime

									

	
	It began with letters really. 
After that first fleeting week. 
Even then we only saw each other twice and then she was gone. 
Slipped right through my fingers. 
But I had a phone number.
But I only used that to get an address. There was a surprise in the voice. An incomprehension at first and then an easy laughter.
So the letters went back and forth. Long letters read huddled in the kitchen nook that Dean and I called home that summer. This was before.
Her stationary was always much more creative then mine. And never your typical look-at-me-IÕm-creative, pressed-leaf specialty paper store kind of crap. I never have figured out where she got this stuff. Some of it looked like scraps of a 1947 prom dress. Another one arrived in an old cigar box which held half a dozen tiny scrolls sealed with a real wax seal that her father had retrieved from some back alley junk shop on the Korean peninsula. Not the easiest things to write on, but beautiful to get in the mail. Dean was dating a girl who lived in DC at the time and all he ever got were emails, the typical zeros and ones that pass for meaning these days. They didnÕt last long.
I tried my best to keep up. Once I wrote her a long letter on an ocean polished stone using oils and a caligraphy brush, but it proved too expensive to mail. It was more of a boulder really. Dean and I found it one day when we were looking for driftwood to shoot. It took both of us to lift it into the back of the truck. Maya read it when she got back and then together we heaved it off the bluffs of Laguna Beach and watched it splash right through the breakers and disappear into the kelp. 
By the time it was my turn to leave, we were out of the habit of letters. We grew complacent in our proximity. We tried to pick it up again, but the phone crept in. We fell victim to the ever reducing prices of wireless zeros and ones. Sentences became clipped with an abruptness the human voice never has. Then MayaÕs father brought her a laptop from some back alley junk shop on the Korean peninsula and we started in on the emails. 
Then she stopped writing. She only sends pictures now, photostories really. Testimonies in pixels. Most of them are hilarious distortions of me. Occasionally she sends arm length self portraits or enormous parallax distortions of the city.  lately I have been making the long pilgrimage to the mailbox and sitting down to wait for the mailman. By the time he comes there is large pile of cigarette butts beside me and he smiles handing me a bundle of paper, "waiting for something important?"