Long-Distance Calls

26

Why does everything good always have to end so abruptly? Why can't good times last as long as bad times do?

I don't understand why Evelyn would tell everyone that her best friend is Frank and not me. What the hell?

I received a text about five minutes later. "Why can't I find you on Facebook?" It was Evelyn.

"I cancelled my account." I typed back.

"What." She wrote.

"I deactivated it." I explained.

"Well, reactivate it." She wrote.

"No." I wrote.

"Why not? What happened?" She asked.

"I don't wanna talk about it." I typed.

"At least show yourself up on Skype, c'mon." She wrote.

"I said I don't feel like it." I typed in anger.

"Please. It will only take a few minutes. I'm asking you." She begged.

"Okay..." I typed as I sighed.

She called as soon as she saw me online. "Here you are," she said.

"Yeah," I said with a cold voice.

"Turn on the webcam," she suddenly said.

"What?" I pretended not to hear what she said.

"Do it. I want to see you," she said.

I was getting pretty anxious at this point, so much so that I was already fixing my hair through the screen's reflection. "Well, you do it first," I said.

"Okay," she said, and it started loading.

She appeared on my screen after a few seconds. The video quality wasn't perfect at all, but it felt so weird because it still seemed like she was in front of me and she looked almost like a stranger.

"Can you see me?" She asked as she adjusted the hair that fell in front of her eyes. Her big blue eyes were the only thing I thought I could have seen with any shitty video quality.

"Yeah," I said and I clicked on the little camera icon to enable mine.

I could see myself in the right corner, and I actually looked there throughout most of the call, to make sure that I never happened to look stupid.

"Hello there," she said chuckling, "why haven't we done this before again?"

"I don't know," I said, hiding my face behind my hand, "we probably never felt the need to see each other."

"Actually I did," she said, "I do. Many times. I want to have you around. But I don't know why I never asked to see you while we were talking."

"Um... I guess it just felt more natural to just hear your voice. Because you could feel as if I were standing right there with you. You could close your eyes and still hear my voice. Using the webcam, instead... it's not the best quality and so it doesn't feel real."