Cheaper By The Dozen

Just a few hundred years ago,
A mere blink in the eye of the sun…

A message took a while to arrive.

Carrier pigeons might relay a letter between houses in a rural village,
To be later stuffed in a satchel,
And carried on horseback across mountain ranges and through deserts,
To a port where it would be loaded onto a ship.

The ship would battle the seas,
With no radar or weather forecasting,
Without even ample supplies of citrus fruit on board to stave off the scurvy.
With skill divided by chance, it would arrive months later at another port,
Which since the departure of the pigeon,
Had perhaps been taken by conquistadors.

In the midst of hotly contested battlegrounds,
A single messenger with a pack would duck and weave through swords and traps,
Sneak their way past an armada,
And emerge into a peaceful valley.
Only to walk another three or four hundred miles,
Before finally reaching you, the recipient.

So,
If you were lucky enough to even receive the letter,
When you wrote back,
You took some time to think about it.

Odds are good the message wasn’t,
“Hey, how are ya?
Gosh it’s sunny out today.
I sketched a picture of myself in front of this sign I thought was funny,
Here you go.”

Or,
“Do you like dick pics?
Because I have some DaVinci sketches of my penis.”

I can’t speak from experience,
Having never received a letter that required three different kinds of animals to deliver,
But I feel like it’s safe to assume that people had things to say.
Probably not things I could relate to, so... Still familiar,
But something valid and thought out.
Something meaningful,
With purpose.

Perhaps it is just that it’s become so easy to send information back and forth between almost any two people on the whole planet, that we give no thought to it.
Or to the consequences of filling the air with static.
Sound and fury signifying nothing.

This message is more noise, admittedly.
But if you listen closely,
Underneath it,
You can hear the screaming.