She's someone who likes to do things promptly. But her promptness in communication is something that makes a stand out. Whether it is a voice mail, email, text,call or an evite- the moment she receives one, she makes an instant effort to respond. She doesn't have a laundry list of pet peeves, but she gets mildly miffed when people take correspondence easily, or worse yet, when they choose to ignore it. The modern day 'read receipts' give her some kind of solace, that the communication has happened as sometimes, that very comfort of knowing it happened and the party in receipt of it chose to ignore it, for whatever reason they had, put her anxiety to ease. She liked to observe things without being judgmental and suddenly finds that she is in the middle of judging herself for this quirk. She ponders over how her otherwise easy going self takes this particular aspect of human behavior seriously and one day a flash comes to her from nowhere, in the form of a childhood memory.
She remembers being awake to the door bell of her dad coming home and her mom answering it. She shuts her eyes in an effort to go back to bed when she listens to her parents talking in the adjacent room. Her dad's voice sounding strained and low "RS has passed away" He tells her mom to which her mom gasps and exclaims "What?" in utter shock. Her dad's friend in question was someone she heard of but had never seen, but somehow she knew that this man was an important friend in her dad's life.
"He sent me a message through a young boy yesterday and this morning as well. I was busy at work and said I'd show up later" Her dad continues to sound drained. "I had no clue he was dying. Only if I had remembered and taken the message seriously" She hears his voice shake a little and the room falling to a deathly silence. She fails to recollect if her mind went into her usual thinking spiral upon overhearing her parents or if they just stayed silent in the helplessness of the situation.
That event forms a lasting impression on her to a point where she never takes a message easily. She, always, in a deep subconscious, wonders if that friend had something to tell her dad - one last favor to ask, or probably a burden to share which would have made his passing easier. A message that would never be conveyed and would always be conjectured. she inwardly knew that it was a burden her dad had to drag along whenever he remembers the friend.
She smiles to herself when she discovers the foundation of her obsessive need to respond to every sort of communication, even when her ESP senses a cold caller on the other side of the telephone ring. She doesn't ever want to allow herself to slip into a self wrap that might deny a dear one or anyone in some sort of need - whether it be a deathbed wish or a mundane favor of picking up kids from school while they lay stuck in the notorious commute traffic or the simple need to say hello to someone close amid a tough day at work.
Life, she discovers, is death lurking around the corner - and an opportunity to alleviate someone's pain might flip into a guilt that creates one's own pain in no time. and she at that very moment, obliterates the distinction between her pain and someone else's - cause from the perspective she chooses to see, they appear to her as the sides of the same coin.
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