Texting
1.
Two people are sitting in a room, across a table from each other. For the purposes of distinction: one of them is wearing a “ten-gallon” cowboy hat, and the other one is wearing glasses that he does not really need. So the ten-gallon hat guy says to glasses guy “Hey man, wanna catch Super 8 at 3:40?” Then things are silent for a little while, until the eye-patch guy gets a look on his face that suggests he’s heard and processed what the other guy has said. But here’s the thing: glasses guy does not want to see Super 8 with ten-gallon hat guy. For one thing, he’s heard that the film’s a derivative mess, and anyway if he’s gonna spend twelve fucking dollars on anything it’s probably gonna be cigarettes. Plus also ten-gallon hat guy is a terrible film-going companion: he’s constantly checking his phone, or turning to you and being like “so what do you think?” even though the movie’s only been running for like twenty minutes, or clearing his throat or making loud popcorn-chewing noises. So fifteen minutes later glasses guy composes the thought “Sorry man, busy today—dinner next week?” in his mind, but then he forgets to say it and the two of them just sit there in that room for what feels like a long time.
2.
Sometimes I will text message people, and when they don’t respond within 15-20 minutes I will text them again saying “???” as in “what’s the deal, clearly you have your phone on you, everybody does at all times and when people say ‘oh hey sorry I wasn’t by my phone’ they are lying, so what’s up please respond to me.” Depending on context, this “???” can be either hyper-casual or incredibly pathetic. If I am, for example, texting a girl that I like, or that I was in a relationship with but then she ended it and now things are sort of weird, the follow up “???” is redundant and sad, the equivalent of standing outside of a window and actively watching somebody ignore your call and then calling again anyway. You know they’ve received your message; if they want to respond, they can.
3.
The other day I took the 8:45am train into New York City with a girl who is interning at a PR firm. She was telling me about running into a guy who used to be very small but is now very large, at an Avicii concert. (Avicii, I was informed, is one of my generation’s defining musicians. Which is true, but not in the way she thought it was: Defining in the sense that nothing can define more than a niche audience anymore; this guy can apparently be hugely popular without me ever having heard of him.) Her and this newly-large man made out and exchanged numbers, and for a while they texted each other frequently. But then they hung out and got a little high and things were weird and stilted and complex, sort of like real life. I don’t think she plans on seeing him again.
4.
There is a girl who I hung out with three times in the spring of my senior year of high school. I spent each of those times feeling weird and trying to make conversation flow naturally, which is not really something you can “make” happen. And yet: our textual life was sprawling and varied, filled with literary allusion, intimations of sex and The Smiths, long, prosaic-yet-erotically-charged descriptions of how our days had been spent. I felt like I really “knew” this person, even though I did not, and still don’t. Later she’d visit me at college and refuse to participate in me and my friends’ extremely fun improv games. The next day she texted saying she was sorry for being weird and all, she was just really coked out.
5.
A friend of mine once told me that he knows he’s interested in a girl if he gets a tinge of excitement when she texts him, or if at his cell phone’s first vibration he’s already hoping it’s her, possibly contacting him about an exemplary sandwich or an odd day at work or any one of the million incredible, trivial things we text each other day after day. When he gets a text message from a girl he’s seeing and thinks to himself, like, “great, now I gotta waste my thumb energy responding to whatever trivial thing this person just said to me,” he knows it’s time to end things. This, like all my favorite things, is both immature and genius.
