“Do you think you’d like to go prom with me?” I nervously asked.

Prom. While courting procedures have evolved from giving your sweetheart your letterman jacket to making the girl you like your #WomenCrushWednesday, prom has endured. The night where we get to dress up and go to dinner and act like adults (which is appealing for some reason). I’ve always tried to keep a safe distance from the rituals of high school. So it embarrassed me how badly I wanted to go, but I liked her a lot.

Hours seemed to pass before she responded.

She must’ve been at volleyball practice, unable to check her phone.

When she finally did text back, the millions of pixels on my screen that formed her “Yes!” instantaneously halted my hours of anxious pacing, and sent me into a frenzy of warm feelings. It felt kind of cheap asking her through text as opposed to asking her down at the soda pop shop or however it used to happen, but asking like I did is not so uncommon nowadays, and I figured our phones would just be our training wheels until we really got to know each other.

After a time our relationship became official, but between the “Go do five-thousand extra laps!” from coaches, “Go home and work on these impossible math questions!” from teachers, and “Go to your room and never come out” from parents, finding the time to see each other was difficult. Texting became the overwhelmingly predominant medium through which our awkward young love grew.

I was desperate to talk to her, to tear down the wall protecting my thoughts and share them with her, no matter the means by which I did it. I allowed this desperation to control my actions, which destroyed my stoic, hipster personality (if you want to label me, man), and turned me into the poster child for my demographic: the teen who can’t stay away from his phone. Cruising down the highway at 60 miles per hour, I would check my phone. Weighing the inherent danger of crashing against the crazed desperation of wanting to read a “Fine, How was your day???”, it felt like a perfectly acceptable risk.

“She must’ve texted me, and I didn’t feel it,” I would think, justifying one of the countless times I scrambled for my phone instead of enjoying the concert, talking to my friends and family, or simply experiencing the world outside of my 8 gig iPhone, my only tether to her, or to the idea of her, and through her, the idea of love.
We grew accustomed to each other’s texting styles, knowing that when a response was too brief or took too long that something was amiss and one of us was probably agitated. This was much like how, I assume, two lovers can tell when something is wrong through tense body language or a raised voice. Real-life stuff.

I began to play online-romance baseball. First base was when she would send the first text for our daily volley of affectionate arrows launched at each other through inanimate broadband servers. Second base was an unexpected smiley face emoji (you know, the one with the cute little dimples?) which had the power to lift my chin despite the seemingly infinite blood-pressure-raising days of high school. Third base was an unprompted Snapchat selfie that would quicken my pulse. A home run was her posting an Instagram picture of us, which made me happy and was incredibly good at blinding me to the fact that I was sitting alone in my bedroom, cold blue light shining back at me.

Usually after feeling the jolting vibration of my phone on my leg, which often served as a kind of defibrillator for my mood, I wouldn’t immediately open the text. It was more rewarding to just savor her contact name, which included an emoji, and fantasize about how I was about to read a long, thought-out memoir about her innermost dreams. Once my hopes were high and I swiped right, another benign “watch this video of a tiger playing with a puppy! it’s so cute haha” was revealed.

Despite the dysfunctionality of our never seeing each other and our iPhones being about the only way we could be sure the other actually existed, I grew more fond of her than any girl I ever had known. There are many factors. One is that she is a cool person, another is that her meticulously curated social media presence presented only the perfected and slightly artificial version of herself that she wanted the public to see, but most importantly is that due to our lack of encounters in the wild, I had created a Mad Lib of her in my mind.
We were rookies in the game of feelings. The texting felt so real because that was all we knew. The realization never really hit that no matter how many emotion-laced essays we typed to each other from the isolating privacy of our bedrooms, we never truly learned who the other one was. I couldn’t tell whether she was strong or passionate or any other of those other abstract adjectives that give a crisp defined image of what would otherwise be a blurry Snapchat selfie. This lack of intimate knowledge gave my romance-addled subconscious the perfect opportunity to fill in the many blanks with whatever would increase my infatuation. She was everything I dreamed of. She was (adj) (noun).

The long time between dates and short time between texts created a chasm between our fledgling real relationship and our mature virtual relationship. On-screen, all was well. There was a nonstop communication between us chock-full of corny jokes, venting about classmates, and inanimate animations. This fluency in our online relationship made real life, the one that mattered, hard. The preconception of a wonderful relationship made it hard, because in real life, we were still struggling to break free of the outer currents of the friendship whirlpool and approach the seemingly calm waters of dating. So instead of trying to let time progress us, to learn from mistakes, we tried to skip ahead. The apparent perfection of our completely separate online relationship created forced, sometimes awkward, interactions. Even just while holding her hand, the tensions between us made me feel like I was leading an unwilling inmate back to her cell.

Less than 20 miles separated our houses, and every morning we would drive past each other on our way to school. The occasional distorted glimpse I would get of her through her windshield made my heart pound, but — just like our texts — as soon as she appeared she was gone and I felt emptier inside than if had I not seen her at all.

At the same time, I felt as if we were in a long-distance relationship, which fueled a deepening infatuation. My mind had carefully configured this detailed masterpiece of who I needed her to be, wherein she sought adventure like a RedBull sponsored athlete, stayed true to her word no matter the situation, and possessed every other nuance necessary to capture my heart. But it was only a semi-accurate portrait of who she actually was. Just like how, while you read this cathartic jumble of sentences, you may envision a rough sketch of me, but you will glean nothing more.

Us, which really just consisted of one conversation that kept going, lasted for over a year.
Yet, it was so intangible that I struggle to recall stories from our actual interactions as they were inundated by our never ending flow of quickly forgotten texts, which no matter how many emotions or hormones or thoughts are poured into will never have the validity of words spoken.

I’ve been taught to give description, stories, at the very least give her a name to make an essay good, but I can’t pull an image out of zeros and ones. If it feels vague, that’s because it was.

Vagueness plagued our relationship. But it is also what kept it going. It is what gave me the strength to go a month at times without seeing her. The optimistic possibility that maybe she was the person that had been constructed in my mind.

It was a summer night, and I stood alone on our town’s public beach when I made the call. Breaking up in person would’ve been too blunt, too real, too much. After a few mournfully stuttered sentences and a silence where neither of us knew what the other was thinking and neither of us felt comfortable enough to say (not text) what whirled through our heads, I whispered “goodbye” and hung up. I then turned off my phone, ending it for good, and laid back onto the sand dunes —a little splotch of heat blotted out by the expansive cold sand. The stunned confusion that followed made me feel as if I had just awoken from a dream so vivid, I wasn’t sure if it had been real. Too much was in our heads and in our hands.

Much time has passed since the dream ended, but in a faraway corner of my mind written on a scrap of paper floating around, occasionally bumping into my conscious thoughts, the mad lib remains, an idea, unable to be torn up.