The Art of the Double Text

Maybe it's the ever-present Middle Child Syndrome that keeps me yearning for attention (sorry mom and dad), or maybe it's the way that I think too much about the relationships between time and space and punctuation. If you know that I am indeed eighteen, and if you crunch the numbers, it's natural and necessary to reach the conclusion that I was born with a slide phone in my hands, clutched in my weird macaroni noodle baby fingers. Having spent my formative years laying on my stomach with my feet kicking behind me, eyes glued to a lackluster keyboard, I navigated the treacherous waters of waiting for boys to text me back.

by Keely Fravel

In the years following the advent of the iPhone, there are several things that I knew to be true:

• It's super sad to be excited every time your phone lights up.

• Too much of my time was spent trying to radiate the energy of my matte black doc martens and my numerous playlists containing—but not limited to—The 1975, Two Door Cinema Club, and of course, Arctic Monkeys.

• Being insecure about the number of exclamation points in any given text is goofy! You can unleash a round of !!!!!!! in almost any context and it really might be alright.

• :) :( and :/ are more powerful than any emoji will ever be, and that power is increased exponentially if you add a + or a - in between the eyes and the mouth.

• There’s a weird bubble on a weird Venn diagram where desperation, loneliness, and being sixteen bump into each other.

By the time I turned sixteen, I was the self proclaimed Queen of Double Texting. Triple Texting. Quadruple Texting if I like you That Much. Or maybe just put me on do not disturb.

It was a title that I was ashamed of, my very own Scarlet Letter. Except this time it was worse because unlike Hester Prynne, I was left with something far more grotesque than a bastard child. I had a crush on a boy. I wanted to talk to this dude all the time. All the time.

He was (and still is) a couple of years older than me but in all of the good ways. I was sixteen—have I said that enough?—and I thought I might have known everything, but he was nineteen, and he made me realize that I had so much left to learn. The most obvious lesson being that I did not know how to get him to text me back.

From my entirely fragile perspective, double texting was a form of mutually assured destruction. I was positive that I was annoying both of us. But I want so badly to hear about his day! But I’m being so fucking obnoxious! I cycled through a summer of a war waged against myself. My very own civil war! Except for this time, it was different because unlike the 1800s, I’m still not sure who won.

But now, given the passage of time and a lot of deliberately omitted details, I am a decently experienced eighteen. The two years between my days of then and my days of now have brought me gifts of new truths:

• You are allowed to be excited when your phone lights up, especially when it’s someone that you’ve been waiting to hear from.

• There are circumstances in which you do not owe your conversational partner a response.

• The aforementioned circumstances also apply to the aforementioned conversational partner.

• Double texting is absolutely not the end of the world. Neither is triple texting. Quadruple texting might be pushing it.

• Phone calls are the superior alternative anyway.