Exchanges |

This week has taught me the importance of exchanges – of thoughts, of ideas, of words, of belief, of vision – between yourself and another. When you spend a considerable amount of time by yourself, it’s very important to both open and air out your mind in these exchanges.

After many months of avoidance, I ventured to my local gym for an overdue workout. Instead of hopping a subway train to quickly reach my destination, I decided to walk the 1 mile trek. Someone once told me that walking is meditation, and I needed my feet to give me direction. I also enjoy the calm of the neighborhood during midday. When you live in New York, you get too accustomed to traveling from destination to destination via subways train while a similar forward motion occurs above you (if you are on an underground train) or below you (if you are on an elevated train).

(Now, it seems that I am making a short story long again.)

To make a long story short, I wanted to walk to my destination rather than be carried to it. Several feet from Point B, I received a phone call from my good friend, Alan Giles. As I do with most friends, I left the call unanswered (bad habit). Alan is not the kind of guy that you talk for 2 minutes, and I did not want to delay my midday workout for fear of abandoning the treadmill altogether. He left a voicemail. I decided to listen to what he had to say before crossing the gym’s threshold. In the message, Alan mentioned how he stumbled across this blog and discovered that I was attempting to write a novel. I was surprised for two reasons. First, my thoughts were on my novel the moment I received his call. Second, I was shocked to know that someone still read my blog since I’ve neglected it for several months (bad). Against my better judgement (treadmill be damned) and for the sake of a better friendship – I decided to promptly return Alan’s call. When he heard my voice, I could feel the tone of shock in his voice. He knows me. If you are not one of my parents, he knows that I can return a call after several days, weeks, or even months. Yet, the gap in communication does not phase him. At one time, Alan and I had not spoken for 2 years; yet, that gap in communication had no effect on the state of our friendship. It was simply business as usual.

I ended up speaking with Alan for nearly 3 hours. For the first hour, I held station in front of the gym with my phone planted to my sweaty ear. For the second and third hours, I decided to walk around the neighborhood as I spoke with Alan.

Our dialogue veered from the concepts in my first, second, and third novel (I know ambitious) to the hero to the anti-hero to the embedded novel to Alan’s own graphic novel in development to dragons to dragos to myths to soul snatching to failed alien abductions to Marcus Garvey to the African diaspora to going back to Nature to going back to Africa to the drama in our mutual friends lives to just how we’ve been holding up amidst the pressures of the everyday and the every other day. As usual our conversation did not end with the typical goodbye and the press of the ‘end call’ button- my phone died. Even though my phone battery was depleted, I left the conversation feeling refreshed. I left with renewed faith in novel that I was attempting to write.

I am glad that I answered the call. Now, it’s time to answer the Call.

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