It’s December in Arizona, which is to say, it’s beautiful weather and a handful of leaves have finally decided to change color. I’ve had my driver’s license for only one year, and I am taking fast advantage of it. It’s senior year after all, and everything feels like a victory lap; I am trying to suck the marrow out of these last few months in my hometown. I drive myself to school every morning in a maroon Honda Civic, and then use it to get to guitar lessons, friends’ houses, the occasional party (as of fall homecoming, I have attended my first ever party with alcohol), the gym, and most of all, Coffee Rush.
Coffee Rush is the Palestinian-owned, late-night coffee shop of Tumblr dreams in my hometown. Coffee Rush smells like cigarettes; it is a meeting place for people in suits, people with piercings, people playing Dungeons & Dragons. I once went there right after a wedding, still in my sky-blue bridesmaid dress, a little tipsy. Coffee Rush is the Central Perk of my high school sitcom — it’s the only place open late enough (midnight, to be exact) for all of us to hang out, for the price of a cup of coffee. It beats hanging out on dark playgrounds or parking lots, that’s for sure.
All of my friend groups hang out at Coffee Rush, so I’m there with a different constellation of friends once or twice a week. Sometimes it’s everyone from the Harry Potter group chat, aptly named “Dumbledore’s Army.” Sometimes it’s cross country folks, sometimes it’s people from my We The People class or Spanish, sometimes it’s a funny mix.
I’m on my way to Coffee Rush this evening to hang out with a group of mostly guys who I don’t spend a lot of time with, and I decide to break my own rule, a rule I have not broken once since getting my driver’s license: I’m going to text and drive. Not by accident; not because I see an urgent message at a red light and can’t help myself. I’m sitting in my garage at home, ready to go, and I make the deliberate decision to keep my phone next to me. This will be premeditated: I will text and drive on my way to Coffee Rush tonight. I’ll pull over on the side of the road if I have to. I’ll try to do it at red lights and keep the texts as short as I can without giving myself away. I’m going to break this vow to myself and my family. But this way, Henry will never realize that I’ve left my house, and he won’t realize that I’m hanging out with guys.
I didn’t want to lie to Henry; I felt bad doing so, and I certainly worried about what might happen if he ever found out. To me, it was genuinely supposed to be a benign white lie, a harmless untruth (he didn’t ask what I was doing tonight) that would allow both of us to enjoy our evenings a little more. He wouldn’t love that I was going out and would be too busy to text him, and he certainly wouldn’t love to find out that I was hanging out with guys whose names he didn’t know; his favorite guy friend of mine was gay. I had zero intention to cheat or flirt with any of these guys, all of whom would be moving to different states in just a few short months when we graduated in the spring. It was just… it was just easier if he didn’t know.
This was of course before sharing phone locations and Find my iPhone became a thing, so Henry had to take my word for it as to where I was. I could text him under the table all through the hang, attention always divided, always half-listening to my friends and half-listening to him, grabbing a phone charger from my car if needed (I was always prepared these days). If my phone died, I usually had to text Henry from a friend’s phone to let him know (as if the changing color of the text bubbles from blue iMessage to green SMS wasn’t obvious enough). As texting from another person’s phone tonight would give my secret away, I knew I had to be fully charged and fully prepared. It wasn’t enough to just tell him that my phone had died a few hours later; he had to be updated, and probably apologized to, for letting my phone battery get so low while I was out. I memorized his phone number for just this occasion, and I never forgot it.
Henry and I were usually live-texting, that feeling when the other person is responding so quickly that you’re practically in a live-chat. In the fifteen minutes it would take me to drive down Arizona Avenue to Coffee Rush, he would’ve noticed I wasn’t replying and become upset, and I would have had to bail on my plans to repair with him. He would have said something like, “What, no reply?” followed by “Fine. Goodnight.” To be sure he wouldn’t find out about the outing, I avoided being in any photos that could end up on Facebook or Snapchat. He was across the country, and I still somehow couldn’t quite hide from him.
There’s an old adage about boiling a frog. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it jumps out immediately to save itself, but if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it, the story goes that the frog stays put and boils to death; it cannot notice the gradual change.
Of course I didn’t just start texting and driving to keep the peace on day one; that would have been an immediate red flag. Who can’t wait fifteen minutes for a text message? I knew better than that. But it was all slow build and slow burn; it crept up on me. Before they were red flags, they were just… mess-ups. Blips. Accidents. Mistakes. Miscommunications inherent to the medium of dating across technology. All part of the long-distance package. Not red flags. Just… pink ones.
At first, dating long distance as a high schooler was surprisingly the best of both worlds. Here was this pretty amazing guy who could just not get enough of me. I could talk to him constantly and tell him about my entire inner world, but I could also stay busy with homework and friends while he was so far away. Although I did want to cuddle and hang out with him desperately, I was extremely inexperienced, and the opportunity to get to know him without the added pressure of physical intimacy was a huge green light for me. It felt safe.
My mom had warned me time and time again that men often only wanted one thing. She used to recall this Oprah episode all the time where Oprah interviewed two teenagers in a heterosexual relationship separately; the guy was mostly just in the relationship for the moment, enjoying it presently but not thinking about it seriously, while the teenage girl was thinking long-term about their future and possibly marriage. But Henry, all the way out in Wisconsin, evaded that narrative completely. How could he only want me for my body when he lived 2,000 miles, a 31-hour drive (we calculated it), away? He clearly wanted my company for my wit and soul, my humor and perspective. This was a guy who was in it for the long-game. Who dates long-distance for the short term? What is there to gain? He wasn’t like other teenage boys with their carnal needs (which I hardly understood at all, and also, yuck, why do we perpetuate this as the acceptable caricature of young men?!). He was special. He was nerdy but also played football; he liked musicals and played piano; he was more liberal than I and we both shared a passion for LGBTQ rights as we watched same-sex marriage become legalized.
He mailed me his Packers sweatshirt that smelled precisely of him, distinctly Midwestern, and I slept with it every night. We had dates on Skype; once or twice, we even fell asleep together on Skype on purpose. Sometimes, we practiced texting each other in Spanish. I was smitten. He was so good at making it all so… romantic. He had my friend Austen deliver roses to my house on my birthday. He started texting some of my friends, seeming to connect with them. We made group chats.
Still, dating long-distance raised so many digital questions I hadn’t anticipated. I barely understood the dating landscape in real life, let alone online. Should we make it Facebook official (we did) and did that mean anything, really (no?). He would get hurt if he noticed that I was on Facebook (which you can tell by the little green dot on my icon) but hadn’t replied to his text message. So I started going on Facebook less, especially if I wasn’t ready to text him back. If my texts were blue, he had signal, but if my texts turned green his phone was dead, and I’d start to worry. I saw other girls replying to his Tweets; I chose not to create a Twitter account, but I would check his public Twitter if he was giving me the silent treatment, to see what he was sharing with the world. He’d post cryptic song lyrics there, and I wondered if they were left for me to interpret. I checked his Twitter because he almost always posted a picture of me as his Woman Crush Wednesday, which seemed the equivalent of announcing to all his friends at home that he was in love. Read receipts were brutal, so I turned mine off. If he sent the hand making an OK sign emoji (👌) it was his wordless way of saying things were not okay. Instead, it was a sarcastic, “Cool, got it.” And don’t even get me started on the 💔 emoji. These seemingly innocuous digital details began to carry great weight and became the difference between staying up all night fighting and a good night’s sleep. Skype made the long distance easier, but we even miscommunicated about that.
I screenshotted throughout our entire relationship. It started with screenshotting all the extra sweet things he sent me, just to keep them in my phone record and not lose them — after all, we were texting so much that it was hard to go back and scroll endlessly to find old messages. It helped me keep track of details, dates, important things he shared. Sometimes I showed them to my friends; other times, I kept them to myself, to look back on whenever I needed another hit of that fluttery feeling. Without really thinking about it, though, I also screenshotted some of the not so sweet exchanges that we had. For who or what reason, I never was quite sure. But I knew that I wanted to preserve these moments, these memories, even the bad ones, and for the first time in my life, these conversations could be easily frozen in time.
We texted a lot. The conversation that we’d fall asleep having would be immediately picked up in the morning. We exchanged hundreds of texts per day, wrought with inside jokes, memes, links, articles, and quotes. We miraculously never ran out of things to say. It was constant, uninterrupted communication. We probably didn’t go twelve hours without talking to each other for over a year. And that was only if one of us slept for a whole twelve hours.
My friend Austen was also dating someone long distance our senior year of high school. We joked that we were part of a recovery group: ‘AARLDRSG’—Austen and Rachel’s Long Distance Relationship Support Group. Austen, too, felt like the text messaging put strain on him. Austen and I’d sit next to each other in first hour, Photography, and text our boyfriends the entire hour, bags under our eyes from texting them the night before.
At first, I loved this constant communication. I wanted to be inside our little conversational bubble. It was so utterly private and ours. His texts made me smile wide. For a time, I would have rather been texting him than out at coffee or enjoying dinner with my family. Would I rather hear about my dad’s day at the real estate office, or have an attractive young man tell me that I’m beautiful and fascinating? I walked right into the boiling water with my eyes fixed on my glowing screen.
But soon, the ongoing texting, once light and charming, began to feel obligatory. When I asked for a short break from the texting, it wasn’t granted. It was treated like I wanted a break from him. The cue that he was mad was always the word, “Ok.” With a period. If I didn’t reply fast enough, that was how he’d finish the conversation. End of story. My phone was always on loud. I used to set my phone down while I took showers, until he told me that he was texting me from the shower. Then, I started texting him from the shower, too. I even gave him a special ringtone so I’d never miss a text from him. It’s still one of Apple’s ringtones, and it’s a sound that has given me a jump-scare in public more than once in the last decade.
Ignoring a text for too long meant Henry wasn’t important to me, according to him. Especially if something was going wrong for him, I was expected to drop everything and prioritize him, out of love. Not staying up late to finish a conversation signaled to him that I craved sleep more than I valued our relationship. I was always, invariably, having two conversations at once. Texting during dinner at home was off limits, so I’d eat faster and then disappear into my room.
But of course he didn’t mean to be overbearing. It was because that was how much he loved me, how much he wanted us to be together, how much he missed me. He wanted my attention, and I wanted to give it to him. Of course he had to text me, since I was the only girl who understood him. Texting wasn’t the preferred medium, but it was what we had to work with until we could finally move closer together. I was smothered, but I was also smothered in heart emojis, then bear emojis when I started calling him Bear, then this one 🙈, then 🔄which started to symbolize ‘always’ to us.
The texting was my tax, my toll for crossing the love bridge where all the other Forever Couples reside. My love was starting to feel needy, but a very cute, troubled needy man who—in my head—meant well and didn’t realize what he was doing. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I did, after all, want to feel needed. It was better than the alternative, a guy who never wanted to hang out, who couldn’t hold a conversation, who only wanted to drink beer and watch football with his friends; the men on TV who grill and complain about their girlfriends, men who just used women for their bodies and then wanted to make crude jokes in the locker room.
Some people, like my parents, started to complain about all of the texting and asked me to get off my phone. Once, we were on vacation at the beach in California and they were begging me to stop texting him, and I told them, simply, that I couldn’t. I really couldn’t. It wasn’t emotionally safe for me to leave my phone. I didn’t play paddle ball with my dad and sister that day. That was just a month before I would move away from home for good.
There was another waving little pink flag that fall when Henry found my Tumblr, a blog where I posted some intimate fanfiction, poetry, photography, feelings. My Tumblr was where I felt safe to voice my angst in private. An outlet, if you will. It was very personal, and very secret, and I had never given him my anonymous username. For those who weren’t 2013 Tumblr girlies—each account gets a personalized url, and handing out your url was the ultimate act of trust. We used pseudonyms and avatars, never our real names or photos. However, through an accidental screenshot that I sent him, Henry captured my Tumblr and went snooping. When he found it, he didn’t tell me that he’d found it. He read through post after post, my embarrassing 60-page Glee fanfiction, the whole works, without telling me a word. He never, ever asked permission to peruse it.
Opening up to Henry weeks later, I admitted to him that I wrote fanfiction. I was super embarrassed about it, so only my closest people knew about it. When I told him, he sheepishly told me that he already knew my secret, that he’d read the whole thing. All sixty pages of Kurt and Blaine falling in love. I was horrified. I felt spied on. That blog was personal. Why not at least tell me he’d stumbled upon it? Where was the transparency? Remember, we are texting 24/7. It’s not like there wasn’t an opportunity for him to say something. Even more scary to me was imagining—what if I had posted about my hurt after we’d had a fight? What if I’d said something on there about him that I didn’t want him to see? Sometimes I’d used the blog as an outlet during our fights, a place I might write about my throbbing teenage pain. I had come close to posting about him, but somehow even breathing those thoughts onto the world wide web would make it seem too real, too concrete. I didn’t want to leave a trace of evidence.
That gut reaction—knowing I had almost posted about the pain I was experiencing with him and thanking God I hadn’t—that didn’t feel good. Henry, out of respect, should have never read my diary—no matter the medium. But at the same time, feeling scared about what would happen if Henry did read my most close-to-the-chest thoughts should have been a check-engine light pinging on. Because why did I have so much boyfriend-related angst in the first place? Documenting our relationship was a double-edged sword. Write it and make it real (and traceable) or hide it and it ‘didn’t exist.’ I didn’t know where to put these feelings and questions; who to talk to but Austen who might understand what it felt like to be tangled in a messy, long-distance, mostly-texting relationship.
Later, I would write these feelings in pen on my legs where the words could be washed off and never seen again.
The whole Tumblr encounter left a bad taste in my mouth, but it wasn’t a big enough deal for me to make a huge stink. I couldn’t articulate why it felt so much like betrayal — I was posting publicly online after all. It was just the Tumblr culture, the Tumblr etiquette. I knew it was wrong in a gut way but it didn’t sound that bad when I said it out loud. Because of this, it wasn’t like I could exactly explain to my mom why this interaction had hurt my feelings. Try as she might, she wouldn’t understand what a Tumblr url was or why I was posting my angst on the internet in the first place. It wasn’t relatable to her. It felt like there wasn’t an adult who could empathize, let alone realize that something might be wrong.
As a young woman, I was raised to be a peacekeeper, not an instigator. To find the best in people. To forgive. So in the Tumblr instance, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He knew I wasn’t happy that he’d found it, but I left it at that. I said to myself, maybe he was just curious. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he’d meant to tell me. After all, I’m the one who leaked my account via screenshot. It wasn’t that bad. And the Glee fanfic was kinda awesome, if I do say so myself.
I soon learned that he, too, had a Tumblr account. I was never granted permission to see it. There was no tit-for-tat. He got to keep his secrets, and I did not. These double standards scratched at my sense of fairness and made things start to feel unequal between us.
Eventually, I deleted that Tumblr account completely. There was no point to it, anymore, when I felt like he was watching everything I did. I remember wondering to myself if true love meant you never kept anything from your beloved. If he wanted to go through my phone someday, would I let him? Could there be no secrets between us?
Later, I sent this text message to my friend Emma:
“note. you do not have to read this. in fact, i discourage it. but i have nowhere else to say things now that i dont have tumblr so...*
Emma i swear to god i have bipolar disorder or something.
WHY.
i seriously can go from having the best day to just hating everything. you should read the poem i just wrote, because i can’t rant on tumblr anymore and i definitely can’t rant on facebook”
The watery flag of texting-the-love-of-his-life-too-much waved sadly next to this new little flag: Tumblr secrecy. Individually, the flags were pink, translucent. Taken individually, they never seemed all that concerning, wouldn’t have raised too many eyebrows. It wasn’t until I would layer them, years later, putting one flag on top of the other, that they slowly started to become opaque: a brilliant, blood-red flag.