For the group chat

It is late. Your phone is face down on the duvet, and it has just lit up for the ninth time.

Breathe in.

Find a position where you can see the phone, but not reach it. Keep the breath where it is. We will come back for it.

There is a group chat. You are in it. There are forty-one unread messages.

You did not cause them. You do not have to read them. For the next few minutes they are somebody else's.

Notice the urge to scroll up and find where it started. It feels like a duty. It is not a duty. It is an urge wearing a lanyard.

It started with a screenshot. It always starts with a screenshot.

You are still holding the breath, by the way. You may breathe on your own in the meantime. I mean the official one.

Somewhere in those forty-one messages, someone has said, "wait, what."

Someone else has replied only with a photo of their dog.

Someone has suggested a date that works for nobody, and three people have reacted to it with a thumbs up, which means nothing.

Notice that you have not done anything about the date. Notice that nobody has. The date is being held, like the breath, by everyone, indefinitely.

Now notice the small fear. That if you do not answer, they will think you are angry. Or that you have left. Or, worse, that you are fine.

You are a member of this group. Membership is not attendance.

You can be in a place without being present in it. Most of them are doing exactly that, right now… and none of them are thinking about you.

Somewhere, someone is typing. The three dots appear. The three dots disappear.

Whatever it was, it will come back, or it will not. You have no say in either. You have never had a say in the dots.

These are your people. Not because of what they say, or how much of it they say.

They are your people because of the dog. Because someone sent a picture of their dog, to forty-one people, for no reason… and everyone understood.

That is what the chat is for. Not the plan. The dog.

Your phone is where you left it. The number is probably forty-three now.

You can read them, or not. Either way, you were here, for a few minutes, with your shoulders down. And you have been holding that breath for four minutes, which is not possible, so somewhere in there you let go without being told. Good.

Breathe out.