By Brendon Holder.
It seemed as though every occasion warranted a group chat. A group chat for a birthday dinner at that new, chic Vietnamese restaurant downtown, a group chat for a trip out of town to a two-story lake house with a broken hot tub and a massive sound system, a group chat for Black and Brown folk to talk shit about all their white friends in their other group chats, a group chat to find each other in case one suddenly became lost at the dark and crowded circuit party.
Who was keeping all of these group chats afloat?
Who got to decide when a group chat was no longer needed and obsolete?
And, worse, were there any group chats that you were not a part of?
The group text existed in your phone but also outside of it. Its chatter continued to take shape in the flesh and its walls memorialised in-person activity through reductive recounting and salacious screen shots. It swelled, it bruised and, to you, it was alive.
Some days the group chat quaked angrily, with passionate diatribes oozing from its ribs as it denounced a recent bill passed by the senate and, other days, it spoke with fear, announcing another murder of someone you didn’t know but felt a kinship towards because of some shared identity. But most of the time, the group chat was a place of harmony. It sprouted legs and walked to the park where it laid out, played frisbee, got high and forgot to reapply sunscreen. Anyone got a good pre-drink playlist?, a mouth in the group chat queried a bit too soon after a louder mouth bellowed a Go Fund Me link for a drag performer’s top surgery. You wait nine minutes before responding. There was an etiquette to this, it appeared.
You begin to wonder if the group chat is capable of producing an original thought. It rang daily with regurgitated takes from those who were not in the group chat themselves, those who had their words, their catchphrases, stanzas of their poetry, their tweets, their award acceptance speeches, their Snatch Game quotes, their Outfit-Of-The-Days, their Architectural Digest tour videos yanked from their clutches and plopped directly into your chat. The belly of the group chat was an insatiable pit, consistently gobbling up takeout and leaving very little room for a home cooked opinion.
You’d leap to paste a thread you encountered online only to find it already waiting there, shared by someone else. Someone else reaping the likes and thumbs up that would have indubitably been yours if you were just a second faster.
But the group chat also supported. The group chat saw the first date outfit before the first date did. The group chat saw the ‘we need to talk’ text before the soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. The group chat listened, it soothed, gave bad advice, occasionally good advice too, edited your dating profile and told you to get over him, recommended the perfect weighted blanket, approved of what nudes to send and what nudes needed another round of editing and sent you its Hulu login. The group text insisted that it was the most handsome, smart, funny, cursed, fucked up, caring, choatic, thoughtful group chat on the planet. You begin to question if this, too, was an original thought but you become distracted, racing to share the announcement of the Best Actress in a Limited Series nominations. You’re the first to break the news this time.
***
Sometimes, when you’re feeling spicy, you call your group text a “grext.”
***
There was a time where everyone in the chat was cheating – emotionally, physically, spiritually, even. Arguments parachuted across the dinner table on which was worse, if the idea of ‘cheating’ was an antiquated concept and if it’s really cheating if you’re open. The idea of an open relationship pulls out a chair and sits in your frontal lobe, begging you to mull over the word “open.” Open in what sense? Open to allow others into your shared palace, to trot through your gardens and muddy your marble floors? Or open to allow for a greater sense of communication, literacy, connection between partners? You spread your lips to ask the others what they think but then seal them firmly, in fear that your question may violate the invisible contract that binds you together.
Everyone in the group chat appeared to be either fucking each other, fucking everyone else, talking about how they wanted to fuck anyone but what was theirs, or not fucking anyone at all. Sometimes you wonder if you were having enough sex and then, after a bloated bout of ‘it’, where it felt as though you invited the whole world to make a home in your body, you’d retreat back inward and wonder what it would feel like to make yourself whole on your own. You don’t tell the group chat this, blue bubbles evaporating in the cursor.
***
Someone in the group chat sends a message that was meant for another group chat. They say it was an accident but you’re not sure. You start another group chat with everyone else to discuss and accidentally include them in it. Shrug emoji.
***
Have you ever been in love with someone in your group chat? There was a time where you two could have loved each other out loud but the romance you share has become obscured by the threads of your texts and undone in the threads of your sheets. A comfortable silence fills the void where intimacy once took space; no message is left unanalyzed. You think of the glassed red rose in The Beauty and The Beast and wonder if it’s better to have a rose you can touch even though it will eventually wilt or if you should continue to imprison your love within a glass case, where it can have a shot at eternity, where its thorns can never hurt you.
***
You’ve done wondrous things with the organs of your group chat. You’ve adorned its veiny membrane with sepia-filtered memories, massaged its sore muscles with love. A record wails in its verdana where fresh hydrangeas kneel. You press an ear to the ottoman in your group chat’s living room and hear a strong, steady pulse. There lies its heart.
***
One day someone removes themselves from the group chat. They call the group chat things like distracting and cliquey and judgemental and codependent. This shocks the remaining group who consider the chat a “sacred space for chosen family.” The group chat then spends the rest of the day discussing what should be done, if contact should be made and, if so, by whom. You spend the night scrolling back up through the chat, looking for signs of dissatisfaction in weeks worth of dialogue from the exiter but uncover nothing. You see nothing of the environment the exiter described but continue to paddle upwards through the past, to search for rationale. You’re surprised at how much you’ve forgotten. When you think you find something, it’s inconclusive, too flat of an exchange to pick up on any nuance or discomfort, and even then, the consistent stream of dialogue in the thread catapults you to the current conversation.
There once was a time when this would have bothered you. The inability to find evidence, the lack of #TheReceipts! But the group chat has slackened your brain and you can’t even remember what you sent ten minutes ago…
***
You think of other group texts. Hamilton’s letters. The Holy Bible. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Decades from now, an AP English class will be dissecting your use of the eggplant emoji, how its literal representation expresses something quite different in its group chat context.
The group chat is a fun house mirror; it twists, contorts and renders meaning. Could an emoji in your group text be a literary device and, if so, what does that make your group text? A work of art. What did that make those in the group chat? Well, it made them artists.
Or, does that make you a liar? A fibber who texted LOL in silence and sends the sideways crying emoji when, in actuality, your face is sullen and your tear ducts have been inactive for months.
***
On a walk to the park, your phone loses battery. But that’s okay, right? You said that ‘the group chat exists beyond the phone’ and in reality, too. You meet up with your friends where they said they would be but it’s as though you have misplaced your tongue, your communication not nearly as effective as it was with the phone. Where others can reference and add colour to their conversations with the help of what is on their screen, you are left with just your limbs, your speech, your mind. Your friends are calm and enlightened, perched in the park and smirking at the glow of their phones. You smirk too, as if you’re in on the joke, but silently wonder if they are all sneering at you in secret. You utter the words smile emoji but are unsure if anyone can hear you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brendon Holder is a Canadian-born writer based in New York with work in The Globe and Mail, The Puritan, The Drift, Lolwe, and elsewhere. He was recently a Fiction Finalist for the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors.
