Sorry for the late reply. I just got back from spending a week in Nova Scotia with some close friends I hadn't seen in a long while. We used to knock around town and get skunky drunk but mostly this week we just talked and chilled with each other. I find that that's not so common for groups of guy friends, but I loved it and I'm already missing it.

I feel like in person or on the phone, sometimes people tend not to listen to the words, but rather the tone and what they feel the gist is, as filtered through their own perceptions of the person's voice, physical presence, their own physical and emotional state and of course, the relationships in play. That is, we "speak" to each other through all the minutia of our presence when we are face to face or with as much presence as our voice conveys over the phone, which is one reason I'd guess that I love writing so much.

That said, that presence allows us to communicate so much more than we are cognitively able to communicate through the cerebral process of phrasing and diction. A lot of what my friends and I talked about was our memory of who and how we were and who we are and how things are going. What was communicated was the pleasure of each other's company, ideas and sense of humor, how much we missed about how we used to live and our fears and insecurities in the present moment. A lot of things were communicated that were never articulated and sometimes with close relationships, it is hard to just blurt things out, much less figure out how to phrase them, just so. Sometimes a natural break in the conversation fills everything in.

That said, I'm speaking about people I've known for years. People who have seen me falling apart and who can see how I'm trying to fit things together. This is not something a stranger has access to.

Incidentally, I did not have reception or much of an internet connection where I was with my friends. But then, I didn't need to: I had all that human connection I'd been without for a long time while I was hanging with people I hadn't seen in far too long. I didn't realize how much I'd missed our dynamic until I was there. I wonder if a lot of people also go through their day, checking their phones not realizing that what they're really missing is certain people.