The Things We Send Each Other for No Reason
By H.R. Zimmerer
I am fond of a message that has no business existing. A photograph of an improbably shaped vegetable. A dog who appears to have fallen asleep during an argument with a cushion. A line from a book sent to the particular person who will understand why it made the sender stop reading. No arrangement is being made. Nothing needs resolving. Someone has simply encountered a small pleasure and wanted company in it.
There is affection in choosing the person who receives it.
You know who will appreciate the unflattering bird. You know whose sense of humour is sufficiently damaged for the peculiar shop sign. Sometimes what you send would require a considerable explanation for anybody else. To this person, it needs no caption at all. A small private language has been doing its work for years.
I think we can undervalue these exchanges because they are so easy to describe as nonsense. They do not carry the obvious importance of a long conversation or a visit. You would not list them if somebody asked how you support the people you love. Yet a friendship is partly made from having somewhere to take what delights you. There is a particular loneliness in seeing something wonderful and having nobody you expect would want to see it too.
So there is also a particular happiness in already knowing who to tell.
It does not have to be beautiful. I am suspicious of the idea that wonder should always arrive suitably lit, with excellent composition and a respectable literary association. Sometimes the thing worth sharing is ridiculous. Sometimes it is the unexpected noise an animal has made. Sometimes a perfectly ordinary object has acquired a face, and you are both briefly twelve years old about it.
That is a pleasure worth allowing to remain ridiculous. It does not need to be converted into a lesson about gratitude before it is permitted to improve the afternoon.
Nor does every affection need a solemn declaration. There are people who tell you they are thinking of you by sending a song, or an appalling pun, or a photograph of something they know you would have stopped to look at. It may be the only conversation you have that day. You are at work. They are on a different schedule. Neither of you has time to recount your life properly. But here is this small crossing between your days.
Of course a photograph cannot replace showing up when showing up matters. A person who sends amusing things but never makes room for anything difficult may not be offering the friendship you need. The ordinary exchanges do something different. They keep a friendship familiar between the occasions that need more from us. You hear from each other when nothing is wrong, and have the pleasure of knowing that nothing has to be.
I like affection that can be recognised in more than one register. The friend who will sit with you through dreadful news and, on an entirely different Tuesday, send you a video so stupid that you have to stop what you are doing. The person who understands that loving you includes making room for your amusement, not only being available for your suffering.
You can become very serious about being a good person. Serious about being useful, informed, responsible, ready when you are needed. All of that has its place. But I hope you have relationships in which you can also be entertaining for no defensible reason. Where nobody needs the conversation to improve them. Where delight is allowed to be one of the things you offer.
Perhaps you saw something today that made you immediately think of someone. You do not have to turn it into an occasion or compose an elegant message around it. It is a perfectly good use of a few seconds to let them see what you saw. The world has produced something peculiar. You know exactly who would be pleased. For a little while, your separate days can contain the same laugh.
Prose reflection
There is a particular affection in sending someone a photograph of absolutely nothing important. A cloud shaped like a badly drawn horse. The first ridiculous tomato. A dog asleep in a position that cannot possibly be comfortable.
You saw it, and seeing it was not quite the whole pleasure. You wanted someone else to have it too.
I think this is one of the loveliest things we do for one another. In the middle of a day full of things that need answering, you send something that asks for almost nothing. Only this: look at what the world has done now.
And somewhere, another person stops what they are doing and smiles at the same strange little thing. For a moment, the two of you are there together.
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