Text Message Limbo
It used to be simple. You got the girl’s number, you called her, you hoped you’d get her voicemail, you waited for her to call back, you made a plan to get Italian.
But now? Now, nobody uses the telephone for the “phone” part. So, unless the girl is not a girl at all — i.e. over 40 — you’re going to need to send a text message.
And when you do, you’ll enter a terrible place. A place filled with as much uncertainty, confusion, and peril as Mordor or the principal’s office or the darkest reaches of an Uzbeki rape dungeon.
A place called:
Text Message Limbo
When you met at Target while you were searching for manila envelopes and after you’d laughed about your common interests for what seemed like fifteen minutes but was probably seven, you asked her if she wanted to have dinner “tomorrow night.”
She said sure and gave you her number and told you to “text her tomorrow.”
The next day, after three trips to the break room (Tony brought donut holes), four cups of coffee (Andrea made it, so it was tolerable), a stop by the employee bathroom for the daily evacuation (17 minutes without feeling guilty, nice) a survey of the day’s important news stories thanks to Deadspin, Jezebel and your friends’ Facebook feeds (someone put words on a picture and it was slightly funnier than if it had only been words, lolz), and twenty-eight minutes of actual work, you composed your artful contribution to Jenny’s or Trisha’s or Haley’s day.
And at 12:02 p.m., you sent:
“Hey! It was great to meet you last night. How’s the day at the land mines?”
(Because, see, she’s an aide at a real estate law firm but she hates it, so you compared it to working in a salt mine, thought better of it and said, “Or wait, like a land mine!” You know, real estate, land…what, you got it? Okay, great.)
And then you put your phone down.
And this is what happened in your brain during each of the subsequent times you incessantly checked that same phone.
This is Text Message Limbo.
12:20 You know, I’m glad she’s not one of those idiots who’s so beholden to her phone that she answers texts instantaneously. It’s kind of nice, really, when someone has the self-discipline to turn off for a couple of hours.
12:38 Then again, it would have been nice if, just this once, she could have made an exception.
12:54 Heyo! What do we have here? Looks like someone is ready for a ride on the ol’-
12:55 Goddammit, Steve, no, I don’t want to go watch Cake tonight. I’ve told you a thousand times, I hate that band.
1:06 This is it, for sur-
1:07 Seriously, fuck off about Cake, Steve.
1:08 That’s it, no more text messages to outside parties.
1:22 I did say, “Tomorrow night,” didn’t I? Or maybe she misinterpreted. Was it already late enough that she would think I wanted to have dinner on today’s tomorrow?
1:36 I bet she dished a bum number. But she seemed so into me — and why would she have given me a number at all, she could have just said that she had a boyfriend or, I don’t know, was engaged but didn’t have the ring yet, if she didn’t wan-
1:37 I should ask Allie, she’ll know.
1:38 Here we g-
1:39 What the fuck was I thinking? Of course Allie’s going to respond in a matter of seconds, she hates her job more than I do and let’s be honest, if it got down to brass tacks she’d probably jump in my life boat over most anyone else’s.
1:40 Sorry, Allie. I can’t risk any more false positives. They’re worse here than at the STD clinic. I will express my gratitude for your smiley-riddled text message when this storm has passed.
2:02 Maybe her job keeps her away from her phone for long stretches, like she’s a teacher maybe, shit, did I ask her what she does, how did I forget this already? Stupid, stupid, stupid, I hope she doesn’t reference it when we do go out…wait, aide at a real estate law firm, that’s what she does. But yeah, teachers for sure wouldn’t be able to get to their phones all that often, what with all the teaching and such.
2:07 Or maybe she does have a boyfriend but, like, they’re a little on the rocks and she was feeling frisky last night but today she feels kind of guilty and so thinks it’d be borderline cheating to text me back. That’d be a bummer but whatever, at least I had the guts to ask her for her number.
2:12 Or maybe she’s dead, and lying in a ditch somewhere and when they find out that my text got to her phone they’ll come to me and ask me why I didn’t alert the authorities. “Haley always responds to texts within 20 minutes! How did you not know that?” And I won’t let on that I only knew their darling girl for 14 hours, and I will resolve to take their abuse as a sort of lightning rod for the family to pour its pain into. Then, a few weeks later, her sister will learn what a selfless, caring man I am and come to my house to thank me sexually.
2:13 OK, that’s a little far-fetched. Her sister is probably gross.
2:15 Wait, how have I not thought of this? What if the text never got through? What if I’m sitting here worrying about something that wasn’t even executed properly?
2:16 Yeah, that’s totally it, I mean there was that Sunday back in February when I didn’t get any messages and thought something was wrong, but was afraid to say anything because, you know, I don’t want to be presumptuous. But then, sure as shit, it turns out that no one heard anything out of me all day.
2:17 So I guess I’ll just send her another one…
2:18 NO! NO YOU WILL NOT! If you’ve learned anything in life, it’s that it’s never good to grovel. Chances are, she got it. And even if she didn’t, she’ll be impressed that you have so much to do that you couldn’t get around to her. You can be all, “Hey, what’s up?” with the next one.
2:32 Seriously, I have to send her another text.
2:35 Or, you could take a goddamn deep breath and act like a goddamn man and fucking turn your phone off for 45 minutes.
Phone -> Off.
3:10 Thirty-five minutes, forty-five minutes, who’s counting?
3:11 Okay, here we go…
3:12 Sonofabitch, Blake, you too? No! Cake is music for frat dudes who still think On The Road is the best thing they’ll ever read! And Steve doesn’t actually know any hot girls who’ll be there. We’ve been through this 873 times.
3:17 What if something happened when I turned my phone back on? Like, maybe something goes wrong with the data when you switch it off.
3:18 That has to be it. Her response is probably sitting in a server, on the cloud or between here and the moon or wherever the fuck text messages come and go.
3:19 But where does that leave me? Same place I was before? I could send another one but then, do I reference the first one? Because if I do that, and she didn’t get the first one, then she knows I’ve sent two, even though she’s only gotten one. But if I don’t, and she gets a second one without any kind of explanation for why I’m sending two texts without so much as a response, then now I’m creepy.
3:24 Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
3:27 Why did she have to put me in this position? I’m a nice guy. I would’ve paid for dinner. I would’ve been entertaining. I even would’ve opened her door, unless it was one of those situations where it’s absurd because I’m already opening the outer door and can’t get to the next one, because I don’t want to look desperate, but that’s not really the point, the point is I don’t deserve this.
3:35 Look here, dinnertime is only three and a half hours away, I don’t know how we’re supposed to make plans if she doesn’t say something soon.
3:42 Alright, this is ridiculous. And fuck this girl anyway. I’ve got that girl from Arkansas on the hook, too, maybe that’ll be suffic-
3:43 Wait, I hate the girl from Arkansas.
3:51 MOTHEROFFUCKJUSTTEXTMEBACK. EVENIFYOUDON’TWANTTOGOJUSTTELLMETHAT.
3:52 OK, calm down, stalker. Take another deep breath. Remember how, last time this happened, you resolved that it wouldn’t happen again? What did you say then, something about it being awesome how it always works out? Because it did work out, didn’t it?
4:01 Alrightalrightalright. What. Have. We. Here? Worked perfectly. Patience: being rewarded. Persistence: paying off. Perseverance: prov-
4:02 FUCK, MOM, WHY NOW?
4:04 –
4:05 –
4:06 –
4:13 I swear to god I’m never talking to another strange girl as long as I live, I mean, what did I get out of this, really, besides anxiety when I went to talk to her next to the Sharpies, anxiety today, and probably, if she ever did manage to read my text and send one back, anxiety again when it came to planning dinner because what am I, Anthony Bourdain and I know where all the good restaurants are, plus that’s not even mentioning the anxiety that would come when I have to decide if I’m going to kiss her or not, yeah, it’s best that she didn’t respond, I’ll have a nice enough time by myself tonight, maybe watch a little Game Of Thrones or read that new Chuck Palahniuk book or spend some quality time with the Interweb.
4: 52 So I have to assume that this is from someone else, because then that will give it a chance to be from her, unless I’ve reverse jinxed the situation someh-
4:53 FUCK YOU, STEVE! THE ONLY WAY I’LL GO TO CAKE WITH YOU TONIGHT IS IF YOU HELP ME BURN THE GODDAMN PLACE TO THE GROUND!
And so, at 5 p.m., you get into your Accord and you put on Vitalogy because it’s been that kind of day and you can’t be expected to listen to something new on a That Kind Of Day.
Then, at 5:20, sometime around the end of “Nothingman,” with which you’ve been singing along for its entirety because, well, that’s pretty much how you feel, you idly reach for your phone at a stoplight.
“Hey you! How’s your day going? Are we still on for dinner?”
Your body goes slack. It’s not so much jubilation you feel. It’s more like relief.
Relief because you’ve survived Text Message Limbo.
Unfortunately, you’ve entered another place. Because you can hardly text her back immediately. Except that if you don’t, you’re going to miss dinner tonight and you have to leave early tomorrow for Cincinnati for a week and, I mean, you don’t know much but you know you have to capitalize on momentum while you’ve got it.
So your finger hovers over the phone and, well, son, I can’t help you now.
Because, while you might have gotten out of Text Message Limbo, now you’re in Text Message Hell.
And no one knows what the fuck to do in there.
Originally published at www.flipcollective.com on April 16, 2012.
