post cards

We coexist in a world with residual horrors, peripheral indifference, and illuminated stars, and we are expected to do so silently and independently.

I’m in my Ibis hotel room in Budapest, and I bought 10 postcards. I know I am going to send nine of them, but there’s one I’m not sure if I am going to send yet. Every year, I re-evalute who I am going to send postcards to. I try to keep it less than 10 for my sake, so when I travel, I don’t have to spend more than 20 minutes addressing postcards. This gives me a space to reflect who I want to keep in my life and who I want to take out. My postcards are my art project, and I choose carefully who I want to be the recipient of my art.

Very rarely in friendship do you have a fallout that is irreparable. Friendships do not follow the same up-or-out model as relationships, so oftentimes friendships can be left unattended and pick back up at a later date, with the caveat that doing so would depreciate intimacy at some rate. However, there are so many factors that go into how active a friendship is at a given time. Proximate friendships are stronger than distant friendships, but that could change at any point given a change in proximity.

I still don’t have a cohesive algorithm for how I decide who I want to send a postcard to. I have rules, but then I also have exceptions to the rules, and so the rules are not that helpful. The rule of thumb is that if I have not talked to someone in the past year, then they are off the list. In some cases, I reach out to someone to confirm if there has been a change in address. More often than not, it just comes down to a feeling. I have a thing for poetic ends, but I’m not sure what is an ending and what is not.