I Break My Phone

My first and last resort, in terms of fixing anything electronic, is to turn whatever it is off and on.  So, when my phone froze this morning I switched it off, then tried to switch it back on again. 

Nothing.

A few hours later, and my phone is in bits at the repair shop.  It's waiting till Tuesday for further attention, and even then there's no assurance that it's fixable.

I use my phone a lot.  I text people I want to meet.  I send thinking of you messages.  I take photographs and edit them.  I check Facebook, check the train timetables, check the weather, check the time, check my diary.  For a while, I checked my previous night's snoring on a 'sleep app'.  I check my pocket, my bag for my phone before I go out.

And there are the other things. I jot down poetic thoughts in the Notes section when I'm caught short of pen and / or paper. My phone, small though it is, holds in its circuits much of what makes up my life - conversations, appointments, ideas, memories, connections - all those words: all those words and all those pictures. 

I joked to a friend last week that our conversation must be sparky, because my phone felt hot in my hand as we exchanged messages.  I even speculated about spontaneous combustion. 

Were I a different sort of person (an electronics engineer, for example) I might have recognised the heat I've been feeling in my phone - and the freezing I've been seeing - as actually significant.  Instead, I've been choosing, as I so often do when noticing phenomena, to interpret these things as metaphors.