You texted me when we first met and started hanging out, knowing I wouldn’t reply because my phone plan didn’t include texting—and I would’ve been useless at it, anyway. QWERTY was not in my lexicon. According to a forum on MacRumors, the phone in question, your phone, was the Samsung SCH-N330. It had two little buttons on the side you’d press to make the screen pop up, which simply enlarged visibility. You could text with the screen down, but why do that when the little svink sound of the screen popping up was so smoothly cool and dramatic? You texted me, and I would never reply. I had an ancient Nokia with a broken antenna. I was always OK with your coming over, picking me up, meeting up, hanging out, hunkering down at Perkins while we studied till the early morning. I started missing out on hangouts from other friend groups who were early-adopters of texting. I didn’t want any part of it—and I still don’t (mostly it annoys me, bzzzt, bzzzt, all throughout the day). But you kept on texting me, detailing meetup times and places or simply saying you were coming over. And though I hedged, playacted cool, shirked commitment, didn’t like being pigeonholed, I kept on reading your texts, and I’d sometimes reply with a phone call, and we’d always wind up somewhere together. These were the days of memorizing rap lyrics—“I play my enemies like a game of chess/ Where I rest, no stress if you don't smoke sess,”—and reading poetry by flashlight on Boom Island in the February cold. These were the days of mixed CDs and you telling me it was OK to feel my feelings. These were the days of you losing your best friend and me drifting away from a few of mine. These were the days of cynicism from fresh religious miseries and Obama declaring hope. These were the days I thought it was cool to not own a TV. These were salad days, putting on weight, going vegetarian, eating right for our blood type, going out, puking off balconies, gas station Gatorade. And you know what’s wild? We’re both type A-negative and now that we have gotten a little older and balder and have a child together, we now have this little unit that bleeds the same type of blood, and that’s something you just can’t fit into a text message. But I guess what I’m meaning to say is thanks for putting up with my luddite ways. I was born in the year of the Ox, after all. But you were born in the year of the Rat, and I like that weird image, Rat and Ox, like how our personality types, if personality types mean anything at all, usually say we’re incompatible, and text services, were they to market to individuals, would market to us differently, would send us different mailers, coupons, fliers, ads, but Nevertheless, she persisted, and isn’t that the goddamn story of history? I guess what I’m meaning to say is I still hate texting, but I do and will always love yours.
I love you!