The Keyboard Was Right There The Whole Time

May twenty-third. I want to be very clear that I have been using a touchscreen keyboard since approximately 2012. I am not new to this. I have sent thousands of texts. I have written entire blog posts on my phone in the notes app while sitting on the bus. And yet: yesterday I updated my phone's software, it restarted, I opened a message to reply to something completely routine, and the keyboard was gone. Not broken. Not frozen. Gone. The bar where I tap to type was there. The cursor was blinking. The keyboard simply did not appear.

I spent, and I am being precise here, forty-five minutes troubleshooting this. I closed the app and reopened it. I restarted the phone again. I Googled the problem on my laptop, which felt like a humiliation, and found a forum thread from 2018 with seventeen replies, most of which said things like 'same problem, solved it by doing literally nothing, it just came back.' I tried doing literally nothing. It did not immediately come back. I made coffee. I stood at the windowsill for a moment, which is what I do when I need to think, and Gerald had nothing useful to offer.

The exact moment I started laughing at myself

The keyboard came back when I switched to a different app and then switched back. It was that simple. It had been that simple for forty-five minutes. The phone on the table, face-down, was a mutual decision we came to together.

Phone. Coffee. Mutual exhaustion.

I texted back. I said 'sorry, phone being weird.' I did not explain further. Some things do not require explanation, only a small amount of private dignity, and then you move on.