Text messages. At times they bother me. Sure they are less invasive than talking on the phone, but they are also very impersonal and less connective. Born without technology, GenXers learned to use the telephone to make calls so I find a phone call more intimate than a text.

Imagine how I felt, picture me surprised when on the sixth anniversary of Jude’s death, my phone buzzed. One text message. “Keeping you in my prayers on such a tough day.”

I didn’t want to think about this person, so obviously I stared at his text longer than I cared to admit, even to myself. Here was a man who used to be so connected in my life twice a week. We talked. We showed up for each other. We were friends. He meant something to me.

He stayed through the worst of it. The year Jude died, and the years after — the ones nobody sends flowers for, the anniversaries nobody remembers but you — he was there. Years of showing up. And then, shortly after my vacation to Disney World, long after the grief had already carved out its permanent place in me, he stopped communicating. I was ghosted from our friend group. There wasn’t a fight. No reason. It just stopped.

That was a little more than a year ago.

Funny how life can change that fast.

A year when having a friend would’ve made a real difference. A “how are you doing” on a random Thursday in April instead of an anniversary to justify the text message.

Then the date rolls around. And that’s when he remembers.

Is it malicious? I don’t think so. But it’s not nothing, either. Remembering someone’s hard day doesn’t cost you anything — it’s easy, requiring little emotional effort. And for thirty seconds you feel like a decent human being because you sent the text. There’s zero risk to you. All you have to do is remember the day.

What changes everything is showing up. Making a phone call costs you. Your emotional energy, maybe an uncomfortable conversation, the risk of actually finding out how someone is doing instead of assuming a text covers it.

To be clear, I’m not mad that he texted me. But honestly, why? There is no longer a relationship there. So why spend the characters? Because there’s a difference between the people who stick with you through the toughest days and the ones who let you down and walked away. One looks back, once a year, when the calendar tells him to. The other looks forward — holding you, showing up, being there for no reason at all.

I want the second kind. And I’ll do whatever I can to live up to it.