In the fall of 2024, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, I sat alone in a dim room, holding my cellphone’s flashlight over the cursive correspondence of the American poet and novelist Countee Cullen. I don’t tend to seek out the letters of famous writers, and I have no interest in the salacious details that can often be gleaned from such texts. I’m in it for the mundanity—the day-to-day delivery of plain information, occasionally ornamented with a flair of emotion. In a 1926 letter, Fiona Braithwaite addresses Cullen as “the dearest boy in the world,” before opening with praise and affection for a sonnet the poet had mailed her earlier in the year. In a 1940 typed letter to Charles Sebree, Cullen is giving instruction and thoughts on their collaborative effort that would become the book “The Lost Zoo.” Cullen concludes with a warm and tender sign-off, “More next time. Meanwhile, good luck to us both.”
Most of the letters in the Beinecke’s collection are replies to Cullen, and reading them without seeing the originating source letter was a beautiful exercise for my imagination. His friends were writing to him, thrilled to have received a poem in the mail, or a few thoughts he had scribbled down while moving from place to place; their gratitude for whatever thin beam of attention he could shine upon them was palpable. The messages revealed Cullen as someone who took urgent and immediate action when others crossed his mind, instead of letting them drift into the static of indecipherable memories. By writing a letter, he held loved ones in place for a while as their full, clear selves, amid the forest of his daily duties.
I used to think that I was in love with loneliness, but the reality proved significantly less romantic than the concept. Because I’m not in love with being alone, I am in a hotel room at 1 A.M. Pacific Time, downloading a video of SWV singing “I’m So Into You” that’s mashed up with LeBron James highlights. I am sending it to my Punk Pals group chat, even though its other members are all asleep at this hour. “I like to give the lads something good to wake up to,” I once told someone I was dating when she wondered why, at midnight, I was cropping a meme from the TV show “Severance.” She was less convinced that this was an act of service than I was, and I suppose that is understandable. But, then again, the world is complete shit, and the most readily available option, if you’re a deeply feeling and thinking person, is to wake up and scroll a contraption that brings news of the fresh horrors that occurred in the hours of your dreaming. As a brief respite, the silly friend in your group chat, who keeps violently inconsistent hours, has shared something that will probably not break your heart, which seems as worthy an offering as any.
My literary group chat is only literary in that it is made up of people who work with words. We spend very little time talking about writing. It was born in 2017, out of pure necessity: a few of us wanted to start a fantasy-basketball league, and figured that we should get in a chat about it, and so we did. And then the basketball season ended, and we wanted to keep yapping about sports, and so the thread became a group chat of writers who were into sports. And then the pandemic hit, and we needed a place to process the crisis consuming every corner of our lives. At this point, we moved the group chat to the office-place-messaging app Slack—which, looking back, seems funny, but Slack allowed us, as text messaging did not, to organize the varied emotional conundrums occupying our minds and hearts simultaneously. We created a channel for pop-culture musings, a channel for serious, weighty news, and a channel for baby photos, which I took and still take as an invitation to share photos of my dog, who is both an old lady and a baby. We maintained a sports channel, to keep true to the chat’s roots. Over time, the group has become a family affair, as partners and spouses have joined. The conversation is sometimes absurd, and sometimes salacious, but I’ve come to cherish it as a sturdy and rich world that hangs on the edge of the wider collapsing one. I fall into it and remember that even if I fail in a great number of things, on any given day, I can love my friends well just by finding something they love and saying, “Look, I saw this and I thought of you.”
The other chat, of dudes I’ve known since I was a teen-ager, is a group chat in the traditional sense, residing within the Messages app. This means that it is less compartmentalized, and so offers alternative delights. A voluminous list of notifications often awaits me if I’ve been away from my phone—in the morning when I wake up, or when I leave a meeting, or when I step offstage, I get to catch up on the thread and be amused or horrified or both, depending on what is being recounted. One night, after a book signing, I retrieved my phone in the venue’s greenroom and found the full saga of someone’s child swallowing a small toy, ending with the kid sleeping in the back seat of the family’s car after a visit to the emergency room. To exit one world, where I’d been the center of attention, and to be thrust into another, focussed on a toddler’s well-being, felt like a needed corrective for the ego.
I am moved by the persistence of this group chat because it isn’t always, or often, the case that we get to grow alongside our teen-age friends. The group includes people I’ve gone long stretches without directly talking to. Our youth was stained by immense losses, and it was easier, at times, to distance ourselves from a community that seemed caught within a cloud of death. When I was a child, happily ignorant of how the world actually worked, I believed that my friends and I would grow up to live in the exact same neighborhood, on the exact same street. It seemed logical! Of course, in the real world, we’ve ended up scattered across different states, in different time zones, but we also live within the black and blue bubbles of a group chat that has, in a way, become its own neighborhood, its own universe.
As we’ve aged, we’ve all softened, in ways both spoken and unspoken. These were once young men who would throw themselves into other young men while a guitar’s feedback roared from cheap speakers atop makeshift stages in basements or indoor skate parks. They were young men who were lonely and let their hearts mistranslate their loneliness into anger—not that I judge them, as my own mistranslated heart was among theirs. I don’t know when a newfound tenderness descended upon us, or if it just arrived to one of us one day and then everyone else fell in line. “I love you” (or “We love you”) is the phrase that appears most commonly in the group chat now. Sometimes, if I’m on a red-eye flight and can’t sleep, I will search our chat history for “love you” and look through all of the recent instances of the phrase. “We love you,” when someone is making a trip to the doctor to get scans they insist they aren’t worried about, even though we all know better. “I love you,” when someone sends a photo of several members trick-or-treating with one member’s kids. “Sheesh! We love you! can’t wait to pull up!,” when someone sends a video of their new house, its wide windows dumping buckets of light into a living room where a child sits, rolling a fire-engine toy along an illuminated path. Or, last year, when I was just a little bit sadder than I’d like to have been, en route to China for a trip that would span only seventy-two hours, with a slightly bruised heart and enough quiet time to make a crisis of anything: “We love you, brother. You’ll be aight.”
“Another collective win for The Chat,” I often say when someone announces happy news, whether it’s an engagement or a perfect new sandwich spot in their neighborhood. But the role of the group chat is, just as often, to subject one another to a loving humbling. On Punk Pals, one member who lives in New York shares a photo of me on a digital billboard outside of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, advertising a series of events that I am curating. In the image, I am holding a bouquet of flowers near my face. “Aight I done seen enough of bro holding flowers,” one pal replies, eliciting many laughing reactions. “We gotta keep my man away from gardens and fields from now on, we get it dawg,” another chimes in.
On another day, when I find out that I have won a prize, I open the group chat to share the news and am distracted by a declaration that one member has made, hours earlier: “applesauce is for old people and babies fr.” The whole group chat had reached a consensus that this is true, but now I come down, firmly, on the side of applesauce, insisting that I sometimes enjoy it as a little post-run treat. Immediately upon sending that message, I regret its wording (specifically “post-run treat”), which kicks off a scroll of rapid-fire jokes that my phone can hardly keep up with: “Bro in the best shape of his life but he eats like a fuckin toddler”; “alone at the crib eating little cups of applesauce, grow up and eat some solid foods.” By the time the jokes die down, I am sitting on the grass in my back yard, laughing until I’m shaking, and delighted to realize that I’ve been snapped back into my whole self—not the version of me who lives on the page or onstage but the version of me who lives in, say, Whole Foods, picking out applesauce or cauliflower rice. As Countee Cullen once wrote, in a 1923 letter to Alain Locke, urging him to come to a poetry recital, “Some will be there for curiosity, but I want someone there who is interested in me for my self’s sake.” I am someone who wants all of my friends to live in my neighborhood, and I will make the neighborhood wherever I can, even inside of my phone. There we are, all of us, inside of it, laughing.
Somewhere along the way, though, I looked at these two sets of group chats and discover that in the years we’ve been talking we’ve watched the weight of our pleasures become matched by the weight of our concerns, our rage, our despair. On any given day, some of us might feel more scared than others, depending on what disasters are hovering over which parts of the country. This summer, as wildfire smoke from Canada made the air hazardous in the Midwest and the Northeast, people in both group chats would start the morning with an air-check message, to see how the others were doing wherever they were. It was both beautiful and sad. I don’t want to romanticize the exhausting loop of extreme feeling that gets vented in my group chats, but I have come to appreciate the role it serves in my life, which is to consistently affirm that I am not losing my mind. We are all staring into the same yawning darkness, even if we sometimes come to different conclusions about how and where to find small lampposts guiding us through.
And there is respite, too, in the wonderful ordinary, in the daily tasks and routines that we carry out alongside the world’s devastations, because that’s what life is. I love hearing about the smallest parts of the lives that the people I love have made for themselves. I love having a space to complain about some petty or stupid thing—a luxury complaint, I call it. My dog groomer changed an appointment time at the last minute, and now I can’t make it to the bakery to pick up a cinnamon roll; woe is me. I love having people who will tell me exactly how good or bad an outfit looks after I’ve stared in the mirror for several minutes and given up on my own ability to discern. A child celebrates a birthday. Someone’s favorite team gains or loses a player. Someone is having a baby. Someone’s dear friend dies. Someone cooked a meal. Someone got a new pair of shoes. Someone is watching a new show that “you all should really check out so I have someone else to talk about it with.” Someone is carrying a child out of the hospital after a toy-swallowing incident, and the once terrifying story becomes at least a little bit funny in the end, if we’re lucky. And we are lucky, sometimes. The world comes into focus through the commentaries we offer one another on each small movement. More next time. Meanwhile, good luck to us all. ♦
