literature

Address Book

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Literature Text

Address Book
In which a young woman considers what is important in life, and what is worth saving.

Eloide opened her browser, hair still wet from the shower. While she had been in, she considered, as usual, her course of action for the day. At the moment, the shower was looking the most important.
Someone on the internet had requested that she write the last page of a story she'd written a few years ago, and Eloide agreed to it because it made her feel important. But first there was the daily things to be done. This shower was the first of them, then dressing, hopefully eating something before she set herself to pretending being self-employed was actually a viable source of income. Maybe she'd check her email. Maybe she'd even write one. She hadn't done that in months.

In her inbox there was the dialog of responses from a software support woman, who hadn't actually been terribly helpful, and hadn't responded since Eloide's last question. In her opinion, it had stumped support.
The was nothing else there but notifications from websites telling her what she was doing on them, which had knew perfectly well considering the fact she had done them. Now if only she knew how to turn them off.
Eloide tapped the line of checkmarks and deleted the emails.

The inbox was now empty. It seemed to stare at her, the simple line of light grey text on white, reading, "this folder contains no messages". It looked ready to blow away entirely.
No one ever wrote her on personal business. Eloide bit her lip and looked at her keyboard. That was only fair, she didn't write anyone else on personal business, either. That was only to be expected. Her address book was a graveyard of failed relationships.

Addams, Elijah <campfollowerofdarkness@spike.net>
Leave it to Elijah to make a reference to both classic B movies and historical prostitution in one fell swoop. He, at least, Eloide had tried to talk to in the past year. Trying here had the meaning of starting a new message, typing a few lines of small talk; and then losing her nerve and closing the window.
The last time they had talked in person, two months ago, was brief and awkward. And that was because, the time before that, they had assured each other that they would stay friends, and Eloide being in love with Elijah and he not reciprocating it wouldn't change that. It's not like anything had really changed at all. They just talked about something that had been true for years. Maybe this awkward silence was in her head, but no matter where it was, she couldn't get around it.

Cohen, Justin <artictern@nicepants.net>
He was a great guy. But a little hard to talk to. He worked as a writer, improv performer, and that one time that came up whenever he talked for more than six hours, nude model. He had his annoying traits, and while she'd never want to live with him, exchanging emails was always very amusing. She hadn't talked to him in ages, and that was wrong. Now why was it their line of conversation had died off again?

Fletcher, Wendy <flightofthevalkyries@aol.com>
Oh, that's right. Now, Elodie had spoken to Wendy in the last month, during which she was invited to her wedding. After breaking up with Justin, Wendy  had found the man who was apparently the love of her life. Still being friends with the man Elodie had only met through Wendy was a little awkward.

Hayes, Shannon <pinksugar2000@bolt.com>
That email probably didn't even work anymore. Eloide had gotten it off of Shannon in eighth grade, during her campaign to be one off the cool kids. Shannon, being the nicest of them, seemed like the appropriate in. Eloide hung around Shannon, Shannon didn't beat her off with a stick, and voila, Eloide was running with the cool kids.
That was when Eloide realized how boring the cool kids were, and how forced Shannon's smile was. It wasn't that Shannon ever really liked Eloide, she was just a nice person. As such, Eloide tried to keep talking to her after going back to reading in a corner, but it turned out they had very little to talk about.

Stanton, Freddie <freddiemonster@bigbear.com>
She hadn't talked to him in three years. He was funny, and seemed to think Eloide was cute when she talked about things she actually had an opinion about. But he was really just friends with Kirk, and only ever talked to Eloide when the three of them were together. Freddie knew more gay jokes than anyone else on the planet, perhaps because he himself was not so much out of the closet as not aware there was one.

Richardson, Kirk <strideraragorn@yahoo.com>
Why did she still have him in her address book? He'd been dead for three years. She hadn't really even been close to him when he died, had he seemed to be of the opinion Eloide hated him because he was gay, when the fact was his constant whinging on the state of politics annoyed her. They had stopped talking pretty much entirely before he got cancer, and when he died she wasn't invited to his funeral. Eloide didn't mind much. Funerals sucked.

Stephens, Anthony <metoo34@gmail.com>
Now there was someone she didn't understand how she still had in her address book. She really felt bad for him when they first met. He had so few friends, and a really obvious crush on her.  After he attacked her, they settled out of court. It pretty much consisted of her telling him he was dead to her and if she ever had any proof of his existence beyond that day, he'd be dead to everyone else as well. She thought she'd dealt with it very well.

Woodword, Alaina <hartofgreyness86@aol.com>
Alaina and Eloide had been best friends growing up. Nothing could have possibly come between them. With the exception of Elijah. They really tried to stay friends while Alaina and Elijah dated, but as soon as they broke up, the stress of the friends trying to stay together was released, and they IMed less, and went to college, and got busy, and changed IM servers, and stopped talking entirely. But that was back in high school. Last she heard, Alaina was getting married.

The last contact had no last name. Or first name. She knew him only as illegalkumquat. They had talked in a chat while she was in high school, and liked each other enough to exchange email addresses. Neither of them ever used them, and she barely remembered why illegalkumquat was even in her address book.

She deleted the contacts Shannon Hayes, illegalkumquat Kirk Richardson, and Anthony Stephens.
Then she opened a new message window and stared at it.
At length, she decided to start with something easy. It didn't have to be important.

To: Wendy <flightofthevalkyries@aol.com>
Hey there Wendybird. What's up?

Well, unimportant insipid questions were easy enough. She could do them all day. Sure, people would think there were annoying. If they ever talked to each other and found out it was how she always started a conversation, which they never would. They didn't know each other.

To: Justin <artictern@nicepants.net>
Hey I hear you're working on a new book. What's it about?

Eloide rubbed her eyes as she hit send. It was probably the stupidest email she'd ever sent, and the stupidest one he'd ever read. But it was a start.

Now, it was time for the hard ones.
To: Alaina <hartofgreyness86@aol.com>
Hey.
The time had long passed since she had been able to say nothing to her. She would need to say something. Anything. She thought about telling her what she had been doing lately, and decided not to. Staring blankly at a screen all day was really pathetic. Besides, they'd worn out the subject last time they tried to revive their friendship. Eloide rubbed her eyes and thought.
Well, there was that book she was reading. It even struck her as the sort of thing Alaina would like. It was a long shot, there was no way Alaina, being Alaina, always two steps ahead of Eloide would not have read this book was really unlikely, but it was something.
I was just reading this book, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Elodie stared at the screen for a while, thinking of what to say next, and formatted it like a traditional paper letter, although adding the date and address in the corner sounded silly since that was already shown on the email, she simply added "Dear Alaina," where the "hey" had been, and replacing her usual signature, an ascii flower, with "signed, Elodie".
Then she realized it wasn't signed at all and changed "signed" to "best regards".
Now all she needed was neat paragraphs to fill up the space between. At the moment, it read, "Dear Alaina,
I was just reading this book, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Best regards,
Eloide"
Which looked really stupid. She'd have to add more. She'd need at least one paragraph.

It's really very amusing, and adding fight scenes always spices things up, in my opinion. I don't want to give away too much, if you haven't read it, but in this version, Elizabeth Bennet was trained by ninjas. Now, I can understand giving the girls combat training to make the story more exciting, (though I think hiring a bodyguard would fit more with the sensiblites of the time period) but I don't understand why it is kung-fu. There's perfectly good English combat to be had, and if they could travel to Japan to study martial arts to fight the zombies, why didn't they stay there and avoid them altogether? (Even so, I would found someone to teach the girls Win-Chun instead, it's better suited to women, being small with a low center of gravity)

She decided to leave it off there. If Alaina had heard of it, she'd have the ability to tell Eloide about Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which would at least get a conversation started.
She looked at the message one more time, and typed a short second paragraph with a slightly more personal feel.

So, what have you been up to lately?

Eloide hit send. There, that was done. Just one left now. She clicked "new message" and typed in "El". The computer handled the rest.
To: Elijah <campfollowerofdarkness@spike.net>

Eloide stared at the blank entry field. There was so much she should say to him, and so little she actually wanted to. She typed "hello" and deleted it.
She thought of movies she'd watch recently. She could recommend them to Eloide or Alaina, but for some reason, anything she could say to Elijah seemed like pretext, a bad attempt to make it seem like they could talk about something other than their failed relationship. Besides, the last movie she saw was Nine, and Elijah had gotten sick of the Wood jokes back in high school, to the extent one couldn't mention Lord of the Rings to him.
Eloide was really close to hitting "back" and just copying the letter to Alaina over to Elijah. It's not like they ever talked to each other these days.
She sighed again and rubbed her eyes. She really needed to say something and get on with her day. It was already past noon.

Then she finally remembered something. There had been a recent find of dark ages treasure in England. Sure, there were other periods he had more interest in, but there were some cool gold sword hilts in there.
In fact, telling him about it was only friendly. Just a normal thing normal friends do for each other.
Eloide did a quick search for an article on it, and skimmed it to be sure it was what she thought it was. She simply typed, "have you heard about this?", pasted the link, and hit send before she had time to doubt herself.
Eloide looked up with surprise. There was a reply in her inbox already.
Mail Daemon @ yahoo.com, mail to hartofgreyness@aol.com bounced
This email address is no longer active. Message text as is follows...

Eloide sighed and stood up to get some breakfast. At least she tried.
The sad part is, I wrote this instead of doing it. But then I felt bad and pretty much did it.

The name Eloide comes from the woman who has been giving me customer service for the last few weeks. I think she's European.
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