You Up?

A ‘you up’ text at 2254 hours on a Sunday is reminiscent at best, and desperate on the other side. Sunday evenings, actually, all of Sunday is quite sacred, having been raised in a house where people had to be dragged out of bed for someone with a praise kink. The first day of the week, having spent a considerable amount of my childhood as a seventh day adventurer, has afternoons that spread long and thin, afternoons that force you to examine the difference between being lonely and alone.

A ‘you up’ text on a Sunday, especially when you read it the next day at 10 am, is hilarious, no matter where it comes from. It reminds you of things you never knew you’d think about again. Of trees, and ridges and one of the most beautiful sunsets you ever saw. Images replay in your head, in a blinding coexistence of all other times you waited for texts that are still coming. It’s a battle, up in there. A Barbie vs Oppenheimer of multiverse proportions.

In what is, objectively and totally in my opinion, the best piece of work to come out of the pandemic, Taylor Swift opens her folklore album with the song ‘the 1’. I could probably talk about the entirety of Folklore, but ‘the 1’ as an opener, is the best thing since State of Grace (acoustic version). I will try not to digress, and say, Taylor talks about a connection that she has just accepted to have ended. It is a song about that blissful time after letting go, when everything is light again and you come back to yourself. When everything is different, because what you thought isn’t anymore, and it is all okay. The perfection that is Folklore is nothing compared to the existential angst that ‘the 1’ provides. This song, this perfectly constructed song, makes me wonder if someone who sends a ‘you up’ text on a Sunday has ever reached that sense of release. Utter surrender to the universe and what it brings, despite the plans you had made over periods of time. 

This ‘you up’ text, having been read at 10 am, gave me questions. Were they looking for conversation? Who wants to talk to anyone on Sunday at 2254 hours, when Monday haters just want to get in bed, and I, in turn, was Looking For Alaska? If we had checked the phone, a habit I have rebuked from my sacred Sundays, would we have responded? Would the text have hung till Monday 10 am? Would we have been rude, or understanding of the solo essence that Sundays bring poorer souls?

A separate ‘you up’ text that comes at 10:58 am on a Wednesday is a whole other story. It is hilariously coincidental, especially when you are in the middle of talking about the one that came a few days earlier. It carries with it the  awkwardness of not knowing what else to say, when terms of endearment are no longer on the table. It is a highschool boy talking to a girl for the first time at a funkie because he has been forced by his band of brothers to make the shot. It is a right hand crossed over the body to hold the left elbow, a growing urge to scratch the head, and dry throat and sweat trickling down the arse while staring at a girl you daydreamed of all since the last funkie.

I don’t really know where I was going with this, but the essence of it all, is to look at the casualness that befalls a connection that was once your entire existence. It is a pity, could be a waste of time, and as Ms. Swift says, ‘…never by the same hand twice’.