A close friend of mine told me yesterday that she misses the times when she would fall asleep texting someone. You know how that used to be. Your thumbs flying across the keypad till 4 AM and then closing your eyes for "just a minute" only to fall asleep mid text. You would wake up the next morning and hurriedly type “Oops sorry, fell asleep.” Remember when your phone would buzz and you would instantly smile because some sixth sense told you it was “that” person. Remember those days when you would leave school and pull out your phone the minute you got on the bus, and you would secretly hope that there would already be an unopened message on your phone? You would hold your breath and be filled with that wondrous sense of anticipation that always accompanies the unknown. Even if in this case, the unknown was that the person had the “most disgusting biryani” for lunch that day. What was amazing was that you were the first person they wanted to tell. And so, even though to most people that information would be completely inconsequential, to you it was a fabulous start to the rest of your day.
Remember those days when subscribers realised our insatiable hunger and provided us with 100 free messages every day? Remember how it was almost never enough? You would text through tuitions, through dinner, through post dinner family chats. It was an obsession, almost an addiction. And what fuelled that obsession was that you knew that the other person depended on you just as much as you depended on them.
From endless conversations about which flavour of Lays is truly the greatest of all time, to making jokes about the pretentious teens you knew who turned their noses down at Jeffrey Archer novels, you’ve done it all.
Remember when you would reach for your phone to read a new text message, and it would say “Loading” or “Updating” because the text was three or maybe even four pages long? You would read it and then re-read it because it was just so heartfelt. You almost wanted to commit it to memory.
If you’re lucky, this person is your best friend today. What inevitably sealed the deal in most cases was when you had a bad day, and the other person could tell just by the tone of your texts. And they would immediately ask, “Dude is everything okay? What happened?” Initially you would insist that nothing was wrong but they would always know. And then everything would come pouring out and they’d spend hours convincing you that things weren’t as bad as you thought they were. The two of you would spend the entire day (and most of the night) figuring out how to fix your problem, and then at around 3:30 AM, when you were at long last exhausted, your thumbs were complaining, and you had sent well over a 100 texts, you would finally say “Thank you so much for this. It really helped, you have no idea. I love you J” and the other person would say “Don’t thank me you dumbass. It’s what I’m here for. Love you too. Sleep tight J” And you would. Sleep tight, I mean. Because you had your person. It didn’t have to be anything romantic. It was perfect in its simplicity. It was back then, it still is, and it always will be.
