"Ghosting Isn't Cool" Commentary

In creating a modern version of Heloise’s first letter to Abelard, I chose to use the medium of text messages. This alteration highlights several differences between the two versions that affect what the reader takes away from reading each. One obvious difference in the modernized version is the adoption of a modern technology, and style, of communication. After the “playing it cool” stage, communication becomes more concise, straightforward, and blunt (especially when someone is communicating from behind the mask of a screen). This allowed me, as the modern Heloise, to be very straightforward and clear about how I felt. Though the original Heloise by no means hid her feelings in the letter, she sometimes played games in telling Abelard how she felt without (always) stating it directly. In converting the letter to today’s speak, I leaned on certain text conventions to emphasize certain things. All caps imply yelling. Emojis emphasize emotion or imply sarcasm. Short sentences with periods at the end make her seem angry or show emphasis, for example, she says, “I wanted you to CHOOSE to love me. Always” (Screenshot 6). I also cut a lot of the wordiness, anecdotes, and some of the repetition to condense and modernize the letter.

Despite condensing the letter to text format, Heloise’s series of texts was still very long. Writing a long letter is acceptable, possibly because of the length of time it takes a letter to get to the person and for a response to come back. Conversely, in the texting world in which exchanges can happen in a matter of seconds, sending a lot of texts in a row is socially unacceptable. At most, one could send several short texts in a row and still be within the bounds of what is considered socially acceptable. In my rendition of Heloise’s letter, I boiled it down to 46 texts. This allowed me to preserve several aspects of Heloise’s original letter, such as her thought process (points of argument as well as the order) and the emotional back-and-forth guilt-trip. In both the original letter and my modern version, she guilts him in several ways, saying he owes it to the community at large, telling him that it’s his fault her life turned out the way it did, reminding him of what they had, and citing his correspondences with others and laying claim to the same amount of care and respect, to name a few. In both versions, the length is in part owing to the fact that she tries to many methods to goad him into responding. Unfortunately, because of the convention to not “spam” someone’s phone, this number of texts in a row makes Heloise come off as a little crazy and obsessive. Another downside to this approach of mostly “translating” rather than completely rewriting (though I did sometimes rewrite and condense) is that the texts sometimes seemed a little unnatural. For instance, the first text says, “It’s me.” This just seems weird and a little creepy because in the world of cell phones Abelard would already know it was her texting him, and if he had lost her number, “it’s me” would not enlighten him as to who she was.

The style of speech also has its pros and cons. Some may think it odd that my modern Heloise uses complete sentences and a style of speaking that is overly formal for texts. That being said, I hoped that the formality would be understood in this context as underscoring the separation between Abelard and Heloise. Further, it can be read as an additional jab at Abelard. It’s like Heloise is saying, “you’ve become such a stranger to me now that I feel the need to speak to you formally”.  I also had Heloise use a semicolon (outside of the winky-smiley context) (screenshot 10). While this is abnormal in texts, because the Heloise in my story is an academic—I imagined her as a literature professor—the semicolon is in line with her backstory. Along with her speech style, the semicolon also implies she may be unfamiliar with texting conventions, as is common among older people. At the time they wrote the letters, Abelard and Heloise were indeed older. I considered also using frequent type-o’s and wrong autocorrects to point to Heloise’s age, but as she was an academic, I felt that she would probably proofread her texts before sending them. Type-o’s and wrong autocorrects would also have implied that she sent the texts quickly, in succession, and likely in at a time of heightened emotions without proofreading. It would then appear that that she didn’t put time into thinking through the texts and crafting her argument, which is far from what reads as a carefully and thoughtfully constructed letter.

Were I to write this again, I would consider using timestamps on the texts. This would show if she took a little time between the texts to think, if she tried one guilt-trip and waited a couple of days before trying the next, or if she wrote and sent all of the texts one after the other. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know how she approached writing her original letter—if there were drafts, if she wrote it one piece as a time, etc. So this approach would require me to take further creative license over Heloise’s thought process and backstory. Another thing I would do differently is that I would insert more jokes linking it back to the original, like Heloise’s comment “pardon my French”, literally referring to her use of a curse word, but alluding to the fact that the original Abelard and Heloise were French (screenshot 1). I would also consider boiling it down further to just the underlying sentiment. Something like “Hey, I miss you. I know we went through a lot, but this isn’t fair of you to ignore me like this. I’ll never stop loving you, but I’m fine with just texting as friends if it means keeping you in my life. Please stop ignoring me.” Still, I don’t know that this is the most effective approach as it loses a lot of what I was able to preserve by using 46 texts.