Text Regina Villicaña
A friend once told me something her teacher said:
When someone gives you a business card, you’re meant to hold it with both hands, read it, and then tuck it away.
That’s how you show respect.
There’s something about business cards that lingers with me, in the gentlest of ways. Maybe it's their compact certainty, their refusal to say more than what's printed. I’ve gathered them over the years, delicate notes with names I don’t say aloud anymore, numbers I never called. People I won’t see again. Still, I hold on. As if these small slips of cardstock might make me go back to the spaces I once passed through, briefly, anonymously. It’s not sentimental. It’s something else. A kind of breadcrumb trail, maybe. A way to remember that I was there at all.
Once they’re handed to me, I’m left to make sense of what remains. A name. An email. A number. Maybe the occasional website. Some people are precise. Others, elusive. They subtract from the version of themselves they present to the world; crossed-out titles, new names, entire fields left blank. A way of asserting individuality, or reclaiming it. Stripping away the labels handed to them by others; a job title that no longer fits, a phone number that no longer rings. Other times, it’s a detail too private to share. Too intimate to commit to. In a culture obsessed with legibility, they choose absence.
So I begin to fill in the blanks. I imagine them in fragments: what they keep in their pockets, how they hold their coffee, the song that plays when they start the car in the morning. Not because I need to know, but because imagining them lets me drift, briefly, beyond the borders of myself. To inhabit, however faintly, the outline of another life. Through small punctures in colorful paper, these fragments become more than they are. A soft form of escape.
That’s how I met Fredito.
We spoke, briefly, about paper. About how these cards were so simple and yet so valuable. I don’t know how many lovers begin with a business card. I don’t even know if we’re lovers. Maybe we’re paper soulmates, if such a thing exists. But when he handed me his, it felt less like an introduction and more like an invitation. Not quite a love letter… but something that felt just the same.
I’ve spent a long time searching for something that the internet, for all its reach, can’t deliver: presence. Contact. Something warm and slightly out of focus. That moment with Fredo, that card, I think it gave me that. A flicker. A reminder of what it feels like to be human.
Maybe that’s why I keep collecting these fragments. They are, in small doses, ways back to that moment.
