[No One] Has Left the Chat: The Decade-Long Text Thread Keeping Six Girlfriends Together
[No One] Has Left the Chat: The Decade-Long Text Thread Keeping Six Girlfriends Together
By Cassie Coccaro
I sat in a Midtown bar in 2009, my hands wrapped around a beer the size of my forearm.
At 24, I still hadn’t figured out what to do with my body while sitting alone in a restaurant. Smartphones weren’t smart enough to be a distraction yet, so the discomfort led to a death grip on my drink, the condensation pooling under my palms.
My Blackberry chimed with a text in the chat my girlfriends had started once we all upgraded our phones.
Michael Jackson died, it read.
It hardly mattered that most of the girls in this very chat would meet me at the bar in just a few moments. The all-day text updates started around this time and, more than a decade later, have only picked up momentum. For some reason, I remember the Michael Jackson death alert as the tangible start of this all-access, open line of text communication.
In the chat are six of us who pledged the same sorority in 2004 and have grown closer each year since. Together, we shed our youth and stepped into the tenuous world of adulthood against the glowing, pulsating backdrop of New York City.
We brunched and ate and walked and danced and drank our way from Harlem to Brooklyn and everywhere in between, reminiscing about our youth and planning our future. We crashed on each other’s floors. We passed around Advil and water in the mornings, recounting the shenanigans from the night prior and wiping tears of laughter from our eyes.
While nothing is more fulfilling than the time we spend together in person, our text chat is the thread that has bound us ever more closely over the years -- especially as many of us have started our own families and moved to different places just outside of the city. The chat is a real-time diary of our lives... a personal, all-hours helpline to guide us through our individual crises. It’s a celebration of life’s milestones, big and small; a shoulder to cry on; a hug whenever one is needed. It’s validation and comfort.
Our shared history is the solid base of our deep-rooted friendship. But our individuality ensures we continue to teach each other new things, provide one another with new perspectives and, very often, make each other laugh until we cry.
We’ve shared the bursting excitement of new relationships and the destructive and devastating breakups that later followed. We’ve texted the news of new jobs, spontaneous travel plans, deaths in our families and pregnancies. We’ve texted each other through the births our children, especially after epidurals kicked in.
We make fun of our parents. We worry about our parents. We worry about our kids.
We gossip about people we know and people we’ve never met. We frequently debate the mental health status of Britney Spears. And we say a ton about nothing. We share updates that may seem minute and random at the moment but are actually the miscellaneous pieces that make up our unique and beautiful lives.
Because some of us have young kids -- and, as any parent knows, children hate to let us sleep -- the chat is active at all hours. When one of us is awake in the middle of the night feeding or soothing a child, we always have new texts to catch up on.
When I experienced postpartum depression after the birth of my second daughter, these women pulled me through it with their constant texts of support and admiration. They guided me back to myself again, text by text. We raise each other up. There is no room for judgment, jealousy or competition. We infuse one another with courage and confidence. We make each other better humans.
And, now that we’re all stuck at home and forced apart as a result of COVID-19, our chat is helping us all feel a little less confused and a whole lot less lonely. It’s bringing us laughter when we most need it and keeping us together while the world seems to fall apart around us. We live-text through Governor Cuomo’s updates about New York and share disbelief about how quickly and drastically life has transformed. We take turns jumping on the rotating carousel of anxiety -- the ones who feel saner working together to soothe the stress until the damn thing stops spinning.
New York is nearly unrecognizable. The doors to our favorite brunch spots and bookstores are shut and, for the time being, we’re all keeping our distance from one another. But the unbreakable bond we already shared before this has only grown stronger and deeper in the midst of the worldwide crisis.
I take an immeasurable amount of comfort in the fact that if we’ve made it this far, we’re all in it for the long haul -- distanced or together. In such a complicated, turbulent time, this is part of what grounds me. And my gratitude for these women and what we share is immeasurable.
