Promise!

Cell phones might cause cancer, that’s not really news. The research is inconclusive, anyway. Still, at the back of my mind, there’s always a risk analysis going on. If cell phones cause cancer, every phone call, text message and voicemail is a potential carcinogen. The voices of the people you love may end up destroying you in the most literal sense. It never used to work this way with letters and poems. Ballads, dirges, epics, none of these emit RF energy, the risk involved in reading them and experiencing them is entirely emotional. So technology has decided to be a dick again and add a physical danger to communication.
I like this development.
Because now we can’t afford to say anything trivial. Talking to each other is actively killing us. And that is the most exciting feeling in the world.
We are willing to take fragments off of our own lives to share them with others. It was totally worth losing a few minutes to tell you that you looked great in that dress. Now that there is a price to pay, the importance becomes intrinsic. Taking calculated risks has always been part of communicating, and as soon as you say “Fuck it, here’s the truth, here is everything I have ever wanted to tell you, here is every note, poem, phone number, and cigarette butt. Here are memories and hopes and strangers I have smiled at and slept with and loved and hated. Here is me”, it can be the most dangerous thing in the world. Now that the emotional and the physical can share this risk, we can rest easy. Whenever you hear “It’s killing me to tell you this”, you know they are not lying.