I used to think that I was in love with loneliness, but the reality proved significantly less romantic than the concept. Because I’m not in love with being alone, I am in a hotel room at 1 A.M. Pacific Time, downloading a video of SWV singing “I’m So Into You” that’s mashed up with LeBron James highlights. I am sending it to my Punk Pals group chat, even though its other members are all asleep at this hour. “I like to give the lads something good to wake up to,” I once told someone I was dating when she wondered why, at midnight, I was cropping a meme from the TV show “Severance.” She was less convinced that this was an act of service than I was, and I suppose that is understandable. But, then again, the world is complete shit, and the most readily available option, if you’re a deeply feeling and thinking person, is to wake up and scroll a contraption that brings news of the fresh horrors that occurred in the hours of your dreaming. As a brief respite, the silly friend in your group chat, who keeps violently inconsistent hours, has shared something that will probably not break your heart, which seems as worthy an offering as any.
My literary group chat is only literary in that it is made up of people who work with words. We spend very little time talking about writing. It was born in 2017, out of pure necessity: a few of us wanted to start a fantasy-basketball league, and figured that we should get in a chat about it, and so we did. And then the basketball season ended, and we wanted to keep yapping about sports, and so the thread became a group chat of writers who were into sports. And then the pandemic hit, and we needed a place to process the crisis consuming every corner of our lives. At this point, we moved the group chat to the office-place-messaging app Slack—which, looking back, seems funny, but Slack allowed us, as text messaging did not, to organize the varied emotional conundrums occupying our minds and hearts simultaneously. We created a channel for pop-culture musings, a channel for serious, weighty news, and a channel for baby photos, which I took and still take as an invitation to share photos of my dog, who is both an old lady and a baby. We maintained a sports channel, to keep true to the chat’s roots. Over time, the group has become a family affair, as partners and spouses have joined. The conversation is sometimes absurd, and sometimes salacious, but I’ve come to cherish it as a sturdy and rich world that hangs on the edge of the wider collapsing one. I fall into it and remember that even if I fail in a great number of things, on any given day, I can love my friends well just by finding something they love and saying, “Look, I saw this and I thought of you.”
The other chat, of dudes I’ve known since I was a teen-ager, is a group chat in the traditional sense, residing within the Messages app. This means that it is less compartmentalized, and so offers alternative delights. A voluminous list of notifications often awaits me if I’ve been away from my phone—in the morning when I wake up, or when I leave a meeting, or when I step offstage, I get to catch up on the thread and be amused or horrified or both, depending on what is being recounted. One night, after a book signing, I retrieved my phone in the venue’s greenroom and found the full saga of someone’s child swallowing a small toy, ending with the kid sleeping in the back seat of the family’s car after a visit to the emergency room. To exit one world, where I’d been the center of attention, and to be thrust into another, focussed on a toddler’s well-being, felt like a needed corrective for the ego.
I am moved by the persistence of this group chat because it isn’t always, or often, the case that we get to grow alongside our teen-age friends. The group includes people I’ve gone long stretches without directly talking to. Our youth was stained by immense losses, and it was easier, at times, to distance ourselves from a community that seemed caught within a cloud of death. When I was a child, happily ignorant of how the world actually worked, I believed that my friends and I would grow up to live in the exact same neighborhood, on the exact same street. It seemed logical! Of course, in the real world, we’ve ended up scattered across different states, in different time zones, but we also live within the black and blue bubbles of a group chat that has, in a way, become its own neighborhood, its own universe.
