Hello?

illustration by Honey Simatupang

I stalk my friends. That’s right, I’ll admit it. If one of my closest friends is reading this, you should know that I’ve stalked you. I’ve stayed up late into the dead hours of night, with only my Sock Monkey sitting on my bed and the glow of my computer screen to keep me company, to stalk you. For some of you, I’ve memorized your habits, what you prefer at certain times of the day. I’m able to deduce the state of your brain within a matter of minutes.

Granted, I’m not sitting outside of my friend’s houses or trying to hack into their Instagram profiles or standing in front of a corkboard, connecting a perpetual red string to different pictures. I’m talking about stalking my friend’s Spotify listening activity. 

Yes, you, one of my beloved companions. I noticed that on a particularly sunny afternoon, you chose a playlist entitled “basking in the warm sun on a french picnic” and during the early hours of the morning, you listened to “songs to shuffle when you know you’re going to die alone.” Or “y2k songs that make me feel like a bad bitch” when you’re trying to drag your tired bones out of bed for an online class in the morning or “beats to procrastinate to” when you’re sketching instead of finally finishing your statistics project. 

When the world stopped as we all once knew it, so did our sense of one another’s well beings. As any member of Gen Z is already aware of, anyone can hide behind a half-of-your-face Snapchat and dry text responses. Soon enough, I found that when I would check in with my friends (or vice versa), we were all just responding with the bare minimum, the default: “i’m doing fine, hbu!!” 

It’s safe to say that no one during the pandemic was truly “doing fine,” however, after months of normalized isolation (physically that led to the same sentiment in the mental sense), it became easier to just swallow down emotions. Yet, innovative as ever, young people found unconventional methods of communication to check in with one another. 

Of course, there was the period of quarantine when everyone wasn’t too exhausted of Zoom yet (as we weren’t burned out from using the “raise hand” feature for school attendance) and we used it to our advantage. In a matter of weeks, we traded in-person conversations for PowerPoint presentations on “What Ratatouille character would be the best parent” or assigning each of your friends to a Hogwarts house (with incredibly detailed explanations, of course). 

It’s odd for me to think back on 2020 as a period of great isolation. I certainly had my fair share of bouts with inexplicable (and sometimes almost tangible) loneliness, not even caring to interact with members of my own family. There were days in 2020 where despite the collection of characters my contacts in my cell phone hold, my brain would convince itself that every walking human being that I have ever crossed passed with totally despised me — a natural train of thought. However, in the later months of quarantine, I connected with people at my high school whom, to this day, I haven’t seen in the flesh. I was added to a Discord server to play, and please don’t judge me too harshly for the succeeding section of this sentence, to play Among Us, the multiplayer game that the majority of teenagers became addicted to in a matter of months. We don’t play the game anymore, but I talk to my friends on that server almost every day, trying a multitude of different games, watching movies (including, but not limited to, a High School Musical marathon), or even just wasting away ghost hours of the late night. 

There are my friends that I became closer with over Twitter, an absurd app. We (somehow) bonded over 280-character insights into our personal lives, oftentimes oversharing a horribly great extent about romantic, or lack thereof, endeavors or just stream-of-consciousness tidbits about life, the human condition, and the effect of coffee on one’s bowel movements. 

There are my two closest friends with whom I did Netflix Parties, watching terrible, though addicting, new shows. We would tear apart the series in our messages to each other and drool over hot main characters. There is my friend with whom I binge old Disney movies on Disney+, obsessing on the two-dimensional animations and timeless plots we’ve loved since we were young children. 

There are my friends in my classes in which I send stupid texts to see them smile in their confined square while our European History teacher lectures about the Napoleonic wars or while our Literature teacher explains the tension between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in unfathomable detail.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I’m proud of us. In circumstances that brewed the perfect isolationist storm, an introvert’s dream, we found new ways of rekindling connectivity with old friends and perhaps even with new ones. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that life itself is fickle. One minute you’re complaining about having to walk across campus quickly enough to not be late to your English class and the next, you’re doing class in your bed for ten months or graduating on a Google Hangouts call or singing happy birthday to your friend that lives down the street via phone call. It’s also lovely to think about how we were able to check in on our friends, even though those who struggled were able to hide slain smiles behind two-ply facades. Whether it was through Spotify stalking your friends or just a simple Snapchat, we looked out for each other, joked with each other, devoured content with each other, cried with each other, fell asleep with each other, and maintained love with each other. And I think that’s a beautiful thing.