Her best friend picked up her phone and looked at the alert message on the screen.
“Holy crap, you have 17 unheard voice messages! What are you doing?”
She snatched the phone back, gave it a quick glance, and punched a series of keys.
Delete all.
Confirm.
“There,” she said, brandishing the phone to her friend. “And now I have zero.”
[…]
Communication has this way of backing up such that it becomes almost headache-inducing to think about getting to back to everybody. Procrastination leads to outright avoidance until it becomes so burdensome that I would rather just let the phone ring than answer, for fear of being revealed as a person who ignores phone calls normally (”No really, I’m avoiding picking up the phone in general, and because it’s too stressful to think about all the things I missed when I didn’t pick up the first time, I’m a good person, and I value your friendship, I swear!”) an avoider, or a bad friend. Which is to say, I suspect I am likely all three, but my rationalizations are yet sufficiently powerful to persuade myself in all occasions except those when I’m most likely to not believe—those being the hours between 2am and 8am, Friday nights spent by myself, and the occasional time when particular individuals cross my mind—that I’m not a bad person, not really.
