We Only Talk in Memes Now
Our deep midnight conversations retired; their replacements are funnier and emptier.
Priya sent me a frog at 2:14 in the morning, and I understood it as an apology. Not a real frog, obviously. A cartoon frog on a tiny motorcycle, riding into a pixelated sunset under the words "no thoughts, just vibes."
There was no message before it and none after it. By the rules of what our friendship has become, that was a complete sentence. Possibly a whole paragraph.
We used to talk. I mean the old kind of talking, the kind that requires a rooftop, terrible chai, and a phone at 4 percent battery that both of you keep ignoring. In our second year of college we discovered the hostel roof could be opened with a steel ruler and a certain criminal confidence, and for two years we conducted our entire emotional education up there. Priya told me about her father, who spoke to her mostly in report card percentages. I told her about the panic attacks I was calling "acidity" so I would not have to call them anything else.
One night she asked me if I believed in God, and we argued until the sky turned a bruised orange over the water tanks, and nobody won, and it is still the best conversation of my life.
Then we graduated. She went to Pune. I stayed in Delhi. You know this story. Everyone knows this story.
The calls became weekly, then monthly... then whenever. The voice notes shrank from eight minutes to forty seconds. And at some point, without a vote, without an announcement, without even noticing the exact day it happened, we switched entirely to memes.
A cat slamming its face into a birthday cake. A man labeled "me" sprinting from a wasp labeled "responsibilities." The distracted boyfriend, recaptioned every season like a government form. She sends one, I reply with three laughing faces, I send one back, she replies with a skull. Repeat until retirement. Repeat, presumably, until death.
Last month I did something I do not recommend.
I scrolled up.
I went through six months of our chat and counted the words we had actually typed to each other. Original words, I mean, words we made ourselves, not captions written by strangers for an audience of millions.
The total was thirty-one. Thirty-one words in six months, and eleven of them were some variation of "lol," which I am not sure qualifies as a word so much as a pulse check.
The friendship that once needed a rooftop and four uninterrupted hours now fit inside a frog.
So I ran an experiment. On a Tuesday night I typed her a real message, full sentences, punctuation, the works. "Do you remember the roof? I miss talking to you. Actually talking. How are you? Not the meme answer. The real one." I read it twice, felt embarrassingly sincere... and hit send anyway.
The typing indicator appeared and disappeared three times, like someone stepping up to a diving board and walking back. Then Priya sent a gif of a cartoon dog sitting in a burning room, saying, "This is fine."
I put the phone face down on the mattress and felt something crack quietly inside me, like ice in warm water.
For two weeks I grieved the friendship as if it had died in its sleep. I decided the deep version of us was over, replaced by a vending machine that dispensed jokes on demand. Because I could not say any of this to her, I did the next most dramatic thing available to me: I wrote about it. A bitter little poem about loneliness, the first thing I had written in over a year, and I posted it on a community wall for poets, where strangers were kinder to it than I expected. One comment stayed lodged in me for days. "The frog is doing more work than you think."
I did not understand that comment until my life fell apart on a Thursday.
Human Resources called me into a meeting that lasted eleven minutes and contained the word "restructuring" four times. I walked out without a job. I told no one. Not my parents, not my flatmate, not the group chat... No one.
At one in the morning I sent Priya a meme. A skeleton slumped at an office desk, caption: "me, thriving at work." Standard issue. I had sent a hundred like it before.
My phone rang within sixty seconds.
An actual call. In our generation, an unscheduled phone call means someone has died.
"That one wasn't funny," Priya said. No hello. "Your memes are funny. That one was sad. What happened?"
I opened my mouth to say "nothing"... and instead said everything. The meeting, the eleven minutes, the cardboard box I did not even get because everything I owned at that office fit in my bag, the way I had rehearsed telling my father and failed twice.
She stayed on the phone for two hours. Roof-quality conversation, conducted from the floor of my kitchen, next to a fridge that hums in B flat.
Somewhere in the second hour I asked her about the burning dog. Why, when I had finally sent her something real, she had answered with a cartoon in a house fire. She went quiet for so long... I checked whether the call had dropped. Then she told me she had read my message in the office bathroom and cried, and she could not type a reply without falling apart in a place where falling apart was not allowed, so she sent the dog. Because the dog was the reply. Everything is on fire and I am pretending it is fine. That was her honest answer. It was, if anything, more accurate than words.
We had not stopped talking. We had switched to a compressed language, and she had been fluent the whole time. I was the one reading it wrong.
I think about that now, every time a frog arrives at 2 a.m. The frog after a small disagreement means I am sorry. The sweating dog means I am drowning, but do not make it a thing. The skeleton at the desk, I know now, means help. Every meme we send is really one question wearing a costume: are you still there? And every laughing emoji is the same answer: yes, still here, go to sleep.
I will not pretend the code is as good as the roof. It is not. Compression loses data; any engineer will tell you that, and so will anyone who has watched a four-hour friendship get zipped down to a frog. So we made one rule. Once a month, an actual phone call, and no jokes allowed for the first ten minutes. Our first attempt lasted four minutes before she brought up the motorcycle frog and we laughed until my neighbor knocked on the wall.
Recently I found a prompt that asked me to write a letter in a language only two people on earth speak. I wrote mine entirely in captions. It made no sense to anyone else. It was not supposed to.
Last night Priya sent the frog again, but she had edited the picture. There were two frogs on the motorcycle now, the second head pasted on crooked, clearly done in a free app at 1 a.m. with great love and no skill.
No caption underneath. It did not need one.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.