It Was Enough

I received a missed phone call while I was out in the garden. I try not to take my phone outside with me for fear of a cascading pile of rich dirt that would inevitably fall on top of the expensive device. And with drops of cool liquid from the watering canister sneakily trying to fall on to the dark dirt in a mission to make mud, I figured that I should keep my phone inside. The call was from a dear friend who had followed the missed call with a text message. It was the habit of my generation, in this day and age, to leave an intended message in the form of a text rather than one’s voice.

I picked up the smartphone and clicked the button on the side which would illuminate the screen and read the message, Hey, how is everything? 

I called her back and chatted for a bit. “Hey, I missed your posts. It seems that you haven’t written in a while,” she said with a hint of subtle worry in her voice. “Are you making time to write?”

To which I replied, “I just missed one week.” The conversation sounded as though I was a new addict who had missed a weekly anonymous support meeting.

The medium, which has existed to me for eight years for my expression had many holes in it. There had been spontaneous gaps where content should have been but didn’t show through. My blog wasn’t always updated regularly, and I was getting called out on it. However, I appreciated the question and liked the fact that my friend was concerned about me taking the time to write.

She ended the conversation with a welcomed piece of encouragement. “I like your writing, and I look forward to the next post.”

As a writer of so-so talent, it was comforting to know that there were people out there still reading what I was sharing and who continued to happily consume what I was dishing out. There were concerns about the holes, and there was a positive push to make sure that I filled them. It inspired me to keep writing even if I were probably only writing for a handful of people, but that was enough.