We used to talk at the fountain and in the piazza, arm in arm, day in and day out. That is how I grew up with people, talking, sharing, spending hours together. Then, later, we wrote many, many letters, long, detailed and frequent, and so, so welcome. I still find such joy in revisiting these irreplaceable and rich epistolary relationships, many of which lasted years and years and were of enormous importance to my life. Then the phone came along, and we phoned occasionally, though it was still so expensive that we still wrote. I have boxes of letters that my parents wrote me in college and years after, on that featherweight paper that was nearly transparent. Then calling became cheaper and we slowly stopped writing, and phone calls replaced letters. Then email and texting came along, and those slowly replaced calls, and then even emails. Now emojis have replaced words, and Facebook posts are the way we expect to know about others and for others to know about us. Slowly, over two decades we — and I am not talking about my friends in Cetona but about humanity in general — have gone from saying 2000 words of full descriptive emotion and expression of ourselves to saying 20 words and expecting the result to be the same. Or even worse, to let caricatures tell our story, or pictures. Surely we cannot expect human relations to stay the same — whether long-distance or not. For friendships to not wither. For loves to not dry up. For knowledge of one another to not evaporate. For ourselves to not become islands awash in seas of disconnect. We become lazy in expression and unsure about anyone caring about any of our truths. Have any of you counted the phone calls you have exchanged in the past year versus those you exchanged seven years ago, or ten? I feel this deeply, and my life is definitely the lesser for it.