The Curious Bondage of Inattentiveness
By Tolu Daniel
May 1, 2026
Last week, someone I used to speak to almost every day but not anymore posted a video from a wedding in Lagos, Nigeria, standing beside people I recognized, though I cannot remember the last time I saw or heard from them. I watched the video twice, imagining even briefly what it would have felt like if I was there among them. Perhaps I would be the dude with the uncoordinated dance movements in the middle of the dancefloor, jumping in the space where rhythmic movements should have been. Or I would be the dude that the camera caught at the far edge of the video, sitting down and watching the others as if the occasion of dancing was beyond him. The scene exemplified an everyman Lagos Saturday in its usual exuberance and I missed it. Watching the whole affair from the comfort of my apartment office all the way in St Louis, it made me realize that it was possible to remain in people’s lives like this for a long time. You are neither absent nor present, you are instead something in between, something that social media has made easier to maintain. You see enough to convince yourself that the connection is intact. You know who got married, who moved, who started something new, who lost a parent, or a sibling or a spouse. You gather these details without having to respond to them. They settle around you like a version of closeness that asks very little. I have been living inside this contraption for about half a dozen years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how much I miss it.
Being in graduate school makes it easier to accept the oddness of these kinds of moments. Because the days arrange themselves around reading and writing in ways that feel both necessary and excessive. There is always something waiting to be finished, even when you are already working. You begin to ration your attention without realizing you are doing so. Messages become things you return to later. And then later becomes elastic. It stretches without resistance. At some point, you stop noticing how long it has been since you last spoke to certain people. I still know what is happening in their lives, or enough of it to feel informed. I know who is in a new relationship. I know who has left one. I know who is traveling, who is building something, who is tired in a way that leaks through even their most carefully arranged social media posts. This knowledge accumulates without demanding anything from me beyond recognition. It feels like care. But it really is not.
The word people use for this phenomenon now is ghosting, which makes the act sound more deliberate than it often is. A disappearance suggests intent. A decision made cleanly, even if it is unkind. What I have done, and what I suspect many of us do, feels less like leaving and more like drifting out of range. You tell yourself you will respond when you can do it properly. You wait until you have the time to say something that matches the weight of what has been said to you. You recognize that a quick reply might feel insufficient, and so you postpone until you can be adequate. Adequacy becomes a moving target. The longer you wait, the more you feel you need to account for the waiting. Eventually, the message is carrying more than it can hold. This is where the necessity for apology enters, though it does not always arrive as such. Sometimes it is folded into a greeting, something casual that tries to reopen the conversation without naming the gap. Sometimes it is explicit, an acknowledgment that something has gone unattended for longer than it should have. What interests me is not whether the apology is accepted, though that itself might be necessary. What interests me is what the apology reveals about the conditions under which these friendships are now being lived.
You begin to ration your attention without realizing you are doing so. Messages become things you return to later. And then later becomes elastic. It stretches without resistance. At some point, you stop noticing how long it has been since you last spoke to certain people.
Most of the people I care about do not live where I live. This has been true for long enough that I no longer think of it as temporary. We are distributed across cities and continents, our lives moving at different speeds, and shaped by different demands. The idea that we could remain consistently present in each other’s lives under these conditions requires a kind of discipline I am not sure I have practiced well. The French philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, writing in Of Friendship, imagines friendship as a bond so complete it resists explanation. It is difficult to read that text now without noticing how much it assumes proximity, continuity, and a shared life that does not fracture across distance. In graduate school, especially in the United States, there is also the additional fact of turnover. People arrive and leave with a regularity that begins to feel structural. Each year brings a new set of introductions, a new set of proximities that feel intense because they are bounded. You share space, time, and a certain kind of pressure. You learn about each other quickly because there is no guarantee of duration. And then, just as quickly, people move on. Another program. Another city. A job somewhere else. You remain, or at least I have remained.
There is a way this staying alters your sense of friendship. You begin to anticipate the ending even at the beginning. Every August, the city rearranges itself slightly. New faces, new apartments, and new versions of urgency. People arrive carrying the early intensity of beginning, the sense that everything is still available to them if they can just position themselves correctly. You meet them in classrooms, in hallways, at readings where everyone is still listening carefully because no one has learned yet how much listening will be required. You recognize the pattern early. This person will be here for two years. That one for five. You invest accordingly, though not consciously. Or perhaps you tell yourself you are not investing differently, even as your attention begins to follow the contours of expected departure. Meanwhile, the friendships that exist outside of this cycle require a different kind of maintenance, one that does not benefit from shared space or daily proximity. Those are the ones that depend on deliberate contact, on the decision to reach out without the prompt of physical closeness. Those are the ones I have been failing in ways that only become visible after the fact. I am not sure I would have noticed this as clearly if I were not also thinking about the future. There is a point in your thirties where the idea of permanence begins to press more firmly against everything else. You start to consider what it would mean to build something that does not assume its own eventual dissolution. You start thinking more deliberately about the way you show up. The way you delay. The way you let silence extend until it becomes its own explanation. I have been trying to see those habits more clearly. What I have not been as skilled at is maintaining what remains after the recalibration.
There are people who have left this place and carried their friendships with them in ways that seem almost seamless. They call regularly. They visit. They remain present in each other’s lives with a consistency that makes distance feel incidental. I have watched this with a mixture of admiration and a kind of quiet confusion, as though I am observing a practice I understand in theory but have not been able to sustain. Instead, I have often let those friendships slip into the same pattern as the others. The early intensity gives way to irregular contact. Irregular contact becomes something thinner, more dependent on chance, and on moments when memory interrupts whatever else I am doing. Sometimes memory arrives with an edge. A name mentioned in passing by someone else. A photograph that surfaces unexpectedly from the phone. Still, there are moments when recognition feels immediate, when I am returned, briefly, to a version of myself that existed in proximity to someone I no longer speak to with any regularity. It is in those moments that the distance feels less abstract.
This person will be here for two years. That one for five. You invest accordingly, though not consciously. Or perhaps you tell yourself you are not investing differently, even as your attention begins to follow the contours of expected departure. Meanwhile, the friendships that exist outside of this cycle require a different kind of maintenance, one that does not benefit from shared space or daily proximity.
I think about writing (or texting or whatever the kids call it these days) then. I think about closing the gap in a way that does not require explanation. A simple message. A question about how they are, what they are doing now, whether the life they moved toward has become something they recognize. I imagine the exchange unfolding easily, the familiarity reasserting itself without strain. I do not always follow through on that thought. There is a hesitation that has less to do with time zones or schedules and more to do with uncertainty. Not about whether they will respond, though that is part of it, but about what, exactly, I am re-entering. The longer a friendship exists primarily in memory, the more it begins to stabilize there. It becomes coherent in a way that lived relationships rarely are. To reach out is to risk disrupting that coherence. I have done it anyway, sometimes. There are friendships that have taken on a different quality after distance, something that feels less immediate but not necessarily less significant. You speak less often, but when you do, the conversation flourishes. It does not require the same frequency because it has found another way to sustain itself. I recognize the value of that, even as I am aware that it cannot be generalized across all the relationships I have.
And then there are the other kinds. The ones where absence does not just create distance but invites reinterpretation, where the gap becomes something to be filled with speculation. It is a strange thing to learn about yourself from a place you have already left. I think now about something a friend I was close to, back when I lived and studied in Kansas, told me recently. When I left Kansas for the new graduate program in St Louis, I expected the distance to produce silence. I did not expect it to produce stories. Yet, according to her, narratives had begun to circulate about me, about my sexuality, in the aftermath of my leaving. They arrived already formed, as though they had been waiting for my absence to make them possible, as though they had always been there and only needed distance to harden into fact. The content matters less, at first, than the condition that produces it. That your absence has not simply been registered as absence but has been made to signify something. Motivations are assigned. Decisions are interpreted. Parts of your life you never offered for public use are drawn into it anyway, arranged into a narrative with its own internal logic. James Baldwin writes in Stranger in the Village that “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” and I find myself thinking about how easily a life can be arranged by others once you are no longer there to resist it. In my case, it settled around the question of whether I am queer. I am not. But that is almost beside the point. Even if I were, it would not belong to anyone in that way, not as something to be circulated and resolved in my absence. The violation is not in the inaccuracy. It is in the assumption that my life was waiting to be solved by others. What unsettles me is not the suggestion itself, but the work it seems to be doing. The way it interrupts a certain idea of who I have been, as though my life in that place now requires revision, as though there were versions of me that should have been visible and were not, and that absence must now be corrected.
I find myself less offended than I am arrested by its persistence, by how easily it travels, how quickly it settles into conversation as something already agreed upon. It makes me wonder about the responsibility people feel, or do not feel, when they begin to speak a life into coherence without the person living it. I tried, at first, to understand why, to think through the conditions that made this kind of story available. What had I left behind that could be reorganized this way? What gaps in my presence had been filled with this conjecture? There is a temptation to treat this as some kind of betrayal. What I encountered felt more diffuse. I did not know what to do with that. Confrontation requires proximity. It requires a shared space in which something can be addressed directly, where tone and intent can be negotiated in real time. Distance removes that possibility or at least complicates it. Any response I might have made would have had to travel through the same channels as the rumor itself, subject to the same distortions. Instead, I let it sit, though not comfortably.
This decision altered something in the way I thought about those earlier friendships. Trust, once unsettled, does not always announce how it has changed. It appears instead in small recalculations. What you choose to share. What you leave unsaid. How you interpret silence, whether as benign or as potentially filled with something you cannot hear. This has been happening alongside everything else. The drifting. The attempts to return. The uneven maintenance of relationships that now exist across distances both geographic and otherwise. It becomes difficult, at a certain point, to separate these threads. They begin to inform each other, quietly. Silence is no longer just absence. It carries the possibility of being misread, or of allowing others to read into it whatever they need to. And still, despite all of this, I find myself returning to the same question, though I am not sure it is the right one. What does it mean to remain in friendship under these conditions? Where time is uneven, where presence is inconsistent, where people move in and out of your life with a regularity that begins to feel structural, and where even the versions of you that persist in certain spaces are not entirely under your control. I do not have an answer yet. Only the sense that whatever answer exists will have to account for all of this at once, without simplifying any part of it.
There is a way all of this begins to fold into how I think about the future, though I hesitate to make that movement too clean. The questions about friendship remain where they are, unresolved, even as other desires begin to take shape alongside them. Lately, I have been thinking about marriage with a seriousness that feels new to me. It has entered the same field as everything else, subject to the same conditions, the same habits of attention and inattention that have already shaped the rest of my relationships. I cannot imagine it as something separate from those habits. This is what unsettles me. The question of what it means to remain, to sustain presence over time in a way that does not depend on proximity or urgency. Friendship has already shown me how uneven that capacity can be.
There are people I care about deeply whose lives I now encounter in fragments, and there are people I once spoke to every day who have become something adjacent to being strangers. Familiar in outline, inaccessible in detail. The distance between us is not marked by conflict. It is marked by a thinning of contact that neither of us interrupted in time. I do not know how to repair that fully. The apologies I have sent feel, increasingly, like acknowledgments rather than solutions. They name a failure of attention, a lapse in the practice of showing up, but they do not undo it. At best, they reopen a space where something might begin again, though what begins is never identical to what was there before. Something has been lost in the interim, even if it cannot be precisely located. And yet, I keep returning to the act of reaching out because I have seen what fills the gaps when I am not there to account for myself. It is difficult to blame people entirely for the narratives they design about me. We are all, in some sense, doing the same work, assembling each other from what is available. Still, there is a limit to how much of that I am willing to leave unaddressed.
Confrontation requires proximity. It requires a shared space in which something can be addressed directly, where tone and intent can be negotiated in real time. Distance removes that possibility or at least complicates it. Any response I might have made would have had to travel through the same channels as the rumor itself, subject to the same distortions. Instead, I let it sit, though not comfortably.
I have begun to think of friendship less as something stable and more as something that requires repeated entry: a willingness to step back into another person’s life without waiting for the perfect conditions to do so. Without waiting to have the right words ready. Without waiting for the time that will finally make it easy. Ease, in this regard, has not been reliable. What remains possible is something less elegant. A message sent before it feels complete. A call made without rehearsing what it will contain. A presence that is sometimes uneven but still deliberate, still chosen in the midst of everything else that demands attention. Rilke writes, in Letters to a Young Poet, that love might be “two solitudes” that learn how to meet each other. I find myself wondering what kind of discipline that requires, and how often I have mistaken distance for that kind of solitude without sustaining the work it asks for. I am trying to learn that kind of presence, though I am aware that I am learning it late, and unevenly. There are friendships that will not survive that unevenness. I can see that now without needing to dramatize it. They will settle into memory, into a version of the past that remains intact precisely because it is no longer being tested by the present. There is a kind of mercy in that, even if it carries its own regret. There are others that will continue, altered but not erased. I am not always able to predict which will be which.
What I know is that the conditions that made distance possible have not changed. The days still fill themselves with things that feel urgent and necessary. The people I care about are still dispersed, still moving through lives that I can only partially witness. Nothing about that arrangement guarantees continuity. And yet, I find myself resisting the idea that this is simply how things must be. When I say this, I do not mean it in the simple sense of declaring about what I will do differently. What I have, instead, are smaller adjustments. A willingness to interrupt as my therapist once put it, my own patterns of delay. Though I am no longer sure delay is the deepest problem. The deeper pattern is reaching out as if absence can be reversed by a single message, then mistaking the relief of contact for the work of repair. To respond before the message acquires too much weight. To reach out without waiting to be certain that it will be received in the way I intend. To accept that some attempts will fail, that some silences will remain, that some interpretations of my life will continue without my participation. And still, to try. Though I no longer assume trying is the same as mending.
