The Territorial

I come from what’s called the Jones Generation, a bridge generation that doesn’t quite fit in with the Baby Boomers, but isn’t young enough to understand the ones who live by their phones either. We were the ones who learned to write letters, then emails, then texts. Somewhere between the dial tone and the push notification, something human got lost.

The other day, I asked a friend to come by. She’s off for fall break, and I figured maybe we could share some coffee and conversation, two things that used to come easily before the world got loud.

She said she would, seemed glad for the invite, and I believed her. That’s my mistake, because I still take people at their word.

The days came and went. The coffee went cold twice.

The only sound in the room was the clock ticking as if it had somewhere better to be. No text, no call, not even one of those half-hearted apologies that start with “Sorry, been crazy busy…”

And that’s the thing about silence, it has weight. It presses down slowly, like fog rolling in off the ocean, until you start to feel small in your own home.

You tell yourself it’s nothing personal, that people get busy, that maybe she forgot, or didn’t feel up to it, but deep down, a little voice whispers, “Maybe it’s you.”

I try not to listen to that voice, but it’s persistent. It reminds me that when I was younger, plans meant something.

If you said you’d show up, you showed up. Even if you were running late, you called.

A simple “can’t make it” could save a friendship. Now, a lack of response is supposed to speak for itself, but it doesn’t say much beyond indifference.

Maybe this is just how things are now. Commitments are fluid, and silence is the new way to decline, or it’s something else.

Maybe people are tired, lonely, and too caught up in their own noise to hear the knock on another person’s door. That’s what I’m trying to understand.

How to stop taking no-shows personally. How to stop feeling like I must be the problem, and to accept that sometimes people vanish not out of malice, but out of habit.

Still, I’ll keep making the coffee, keep the extra chair open, because once in a while, someone does show up. And when it happens, when the conversation finds its rhythm, and the laughter comes easy again, I remember why I keep trying.