So What's in a Number?

     Fairly recently, for reasons that are exciting to me but very few other people will really care about, I deactivated my old mobile phone account, thereby releasing my hold on a phone number that had been near and dear to me for basically all of my legally adult life. In all actuality, it is something I should have done long before, but I couldn’t bring myself to let it go. Virtually everyone who has known me for any significant length of time has used that number to reach me. Party invites, emergencies that required my attention, break up calls and text messages, drawings for free cruises I’d won without ever actually entering, you name it. In an age where people are rarely more than five feet away from their phones, that number was almost as much a part of me as well, maybe not my first name, but perhaps my middle name. When I moved away from the large one starred state in which I was born and raised, that number was how my friends and family reminded me that I was still loved and missed, via harassments and demands that I return so we can die together in San Antonio as planned.
     Letting something like that go felt like one too many steps away from those people and that part of my life. Like somehow I was going to forget all those late nights and totally worth it poor decisions, or all those times I went to see some of my more musically gifted friends perform. I’d already moved across the country and gone from seeing most of them multiple times a week to maybe once a year, if that, and I didn’t relish the idea of furthering that gap.That was what I told myself for months, despite the immediate access most of us had and still have to social media and email, because those are less private, less… authentic. You can look up anyone on those sites, but when people choose to share phone numbers, it just means more.
     At least, that’s the kind of stuff I was telling myself as I shelled out a bunch of money every month for something I never used anymore. The truth is, letting something like that go doesn’t really mean anything. The people who really mean to keep you around will do so, and vice versa. Even if you go a while without talking, you’re still connected through your history. If our experiences make us what we are, then those people are a part of me, and I’m a part of them, even though a great deal of them may rather that wasn’t the case.The connection isn’t going to go away just because the digits change.
     Really though, disconnecting that number reminded me about all those times I spent with the people I’ve been rambling about, and what they meant and still mean to me, and how invested in them I will always be, no matter how far apart we are or how long it’s been since we talked or saw each other. Some of them have kids I still haven’t met, some of them got married and/or moved away to their own new part of the world, and most of them won’t even read this.
Which is fine, and I’m not bitter about it at all.
     I guess what I’m driving at, friends and neighbors, is that getting rid of this number made me think about how long it’s been since I saw so many of these people that I love, and I need to make a trip back soon, and apparently I’m a big old mushy sap now.
     Or whatever. Shut up.
-John