The Group Chat Incident of October 2019

October twenty-seventh. I was trying to text a perfectly reasonable message about whether the climbing gym would be crowded on Tuesday, and my phone, my phone, which I trust, which I have carried everywhere for two years, decided that what I meant to say was something that I cannot fully reproduce here but which reads, in its final form, as a kind of surrealist haiku about a stranger's thermos.

I sent it before I read it back. Of course I did. I always send before I read it back. The read-back is a ceremony I perform only after the send, when it is completely useless. Three dots appeared immediately. Then nothing for what felt like four business days. Then a reply that was simply a photograph of a wall. I don't know what the wall meant. I chose to interpret it as solidarity.

When the autocorrect wins and you know it

The thing is, I laughed about it for a genuinely unreasonable amount of time. I ended up on the kitchen floor. Gerald witnessed it. Carol's letter came last week, the real one, two full pages, her handwriting at its most deliberate, and I've been sitting with that in the background all week, which maybe explains why a thermos haiku hit me as hard as it did. You hold something serious long enough and your body just finds a release valve wherever it can. The kitchen floor on a Sunday afternoon is apparently mine.

Replaying it. Still worse every time.

I put the phone face-down eventually. Made tea. Looked at the windowsill for a while. Thought about Carol's answer and what it means that it landed so close to something I'd already been circling. Then I thought about the thermos haiku again and had to sit down a second time. Some days are just like that.