The Frozen Phone

I brought my Ecuador phone to Madrid because I knew that the phone company Movistar was popular in Spain. Unfortunately, my Ecuador phone´s bandwidth or something along those lines did not match up to that of Spain. I had no choice but to buy a Spanish phone, but I left my Ecuadorian phone in my purse and never remembered to take it out. Yesterday, my friend was playing with her Spanish phone that looked a lot like my Ecuador phone, and when I took my phone out to compare, I was hit by a very melancholy sensation, indeed...

I turned on my Ecuador phone, just because. I saw my message inbox. I saw the outgoing calls. I saw my contact list which contained every person that made up my world for four months. Then it hit me that all of the numbers of my American friends in Ecuador were now null. I couldn´t come to understand if last semester had been only a dream or a parallel life. But, it was so real. Seeing all of this recent activity in my phone, I almost came to believe that my host brother or my friend Anne could call me at any moment.

With phone in hand, I can almost reach out and touch that life. But, the phone is frozen in time--in Decemeber 2009, and with each day I drift further and further away from that date. With time, that life really does come to seem more like a dream. But, then I turn my phone on, and it´s December 20, 2009. I know it´s silly for me to be attached to this little gadget, but all of my memories are stored within it. All my plans with friends, late-night conversations about the meaning of life, cute texts from crushes...

It´s there. December is living and breathing right before my eyes, if only for a moment, side by side with February 2010.