Pick up, your life's on the line.

It’s so easy to take for granted the simple sound of a ringing phone. Your whole life it’s there as a recognizable sound, something you run towards before the machine picks up, the way you keep checking your cell for vibrating pulses in your back pocket because you could have sworn you heard it, felt it, sensed it.

There are moments when you long for it, stretches of time when you’re just waiting for someone to call, hoping for someone to be thinking about you at the exact same moment you’re thinking about them, knowing you’re both so far apart and yet needing to reach out to each other across miles.

However I think that when it becomes a year, a whole year of you being afraid of the sound of a ringing phone, having long since forgotten what its shrilling rings used to represent before - hope, excitement, your future (and future dinner plans) - I suppose you can’t help but wonder sometimes if that feeling will ever entirely go away. Or will you always be thinking in the back of your mind that the phone could ring any minute and once again your life will be turned upside down?

That’s the chance you take every time you make that conscious decision to venture out into the unknown. Each ringing phone and street taken, each corner turned and person met there it is, chance, looming over you like an overcast sky. And it’s so easy to take for granted the things you had before you picked up and everything fell away so quickly.

But it keeps ringing and pulsing and vibrating in bags and pockets and on kitchen walls and lives keep changing because of it, and you think - if only they could just invent a phone that could reach out across time and space and dial you back into your past, back to the way it was before you were forced to ever have to make the decision to answer at all.