But soft­ware, what light through yon­der chat win­dow breaks?

I thought we were just talk­ing. The way all cou­ples do, the chat­ter that be­gins and ends with­out much ef­fort. A thought floats by: grab it, bend it slightly, angle it to­wards the light, arrange it well, pre­sent it to your part­ner, “Hon, I was think­ing about how ot­ters have to give birth at sea and I had a ques­tion...”

Then she pre­sents an an­swer, he snorts hap­pily, they amuse each other's sen­si­bil­i­ties. Or do they amuse each other's con­ceits? Ei­ther way they tol­er­ate the earnest­ness of the other and go back to their put­tered apart­ment. I thought we were just talk­ing.

We have, she and I, talked about talk­ing a good num­ber of times. We could leave a restau­rant and say, “Oh the dis­course dur­ing the soup was just amaz­ing, but when the large plates came, well, I can't stand that kind of meaty, down-home talk.”

Re­gard­less, we never talked about sea ot­ters. We had busy things to talk about, very urban things. 

The whole point of the story is this, I wanted to know what an in­ter­view was so I asked her, being the smartest per­son I know, and she was in­clined to an­swer. I knew she recorded every­thing that hap­pened, as it was still the Sea­son of the Live­blog. “Doc­u­men­ta­tion,” she said, “was the dif­fer­ence be­tween an in­ter­view and a con­ver­sa­tion.”

I saw a vi­sion clearly. I saw the buck­led thread of our friend­ship come into focus. For years we had chat­ted on gmail, then face­book, now skype. The miss­ing bit of in­for­ma­tion miss­ing from the face­book -> skype tra­jec­tory is that she would mute the mi­cro­phone.

Our pos­tures trans­mit­ted on the screen we could fid­get and fart in pri­vate si­lence, the only words that passed be­tween us were writ­ten. It was care­fully cu­rated po­etry, a the­ol­ogy of in­stant mes­sag­ing. We had lived in more cities than you can count on one hand and not in that many years. Never to­gether, but with enough words be­tween us that we were both the clos­est and the far­thest away, until this sum­mer.

It was sum­mer and she had left New York for time to breathe in Oak­land and then was back home, here in Seat­tle, ready to start some­thing. We con­nected like we had al­ways meant to. We’d been too pained by ado­les­cent men­tal ill­ness be­fore. Lan­guage flowed like candy, lube, sun­shine, break up. It's al­ways sud­den isn’t it? Bet­ter to admit it soon, or that's what I'd say.

Be­fore the end, in the ten­der sum­mer within sum­mer, was when she'd said it, “doc­u­men­ta­tion.” I al­ways knew some­thing about his­tory, some­thing about “to the vic­tor go the spoils,” some­thing about who it is that gets to write the book. What I didn't know was that I had been on record the whole time. Tic-tak-tik-tak.