doubting in the digital age

So here we are, two and a half months in, and Jack has finally acquired a phone.

This means I can reach him if and when I find myself locked out of the loft, or the C train gets stuck and he's waiting by the fountain at the Met, in the cold. It means thoughtful text messages at twenty cents a pop, which I know will be few and far between, but still they make me smile.

It also means abject dread. You see, the phone is the final province of privacy, the primary medium of liars and cheaters the whole world over. Suddenly, I'm on high alert for shady cell behavior. The damn thing rings—and it is a garish ring, the overly obtrusive jangle of the electronic toy—and I panic. As if the hordes of eligible women wanted only this mode of contact to be opened to descend upon him, begging for dates. As if I had him tucked away in a place apart from all this texting and being always available for interruption, and now he flew the coop.

I suppose I ought just to trust that he is not of that unfortunate ilk, and stop searching for trouble before it has time to track me down. But it is hard, still, not to see the little LG mobile device as the foreboding beginning of the end, and I hereby mourn the moment on Friday afternoons when I would turn my phone to silent and surrender to these weekends out of time.