Late night Zoom calls and kindred spirits

As an extrovert on the furthest end of the extroversion spectrum, I initially shrugged off the concept of FaceTime and Zoom calls as a substitute for genuine human contact. It was my all or nothing approach to this sudden plunge into confusion and uncertainty. Video calls were a weak shadow of what I used to have: my people, the people I cherished and adored, right there next to me. 

But one friend of mine was rather persistent in her requests to FaceTime, unaware that she was slowly drawing me out of a shell I had constructed around myself. Jessie didn’t know that she was providing me with a bright space to find comfort in each day; she was simply reaching out, looking to listen and be listened to, laugh and tell jokes, smile and shed tears. 

We quickly lapsed into a sort of pattern. As night pulled a blanket over the sky and our respective households began to calm and fall into rest, we would come alive. A few hours turned into the whole night, night after night. 

And while Jessie and I had been friends before our whole world changed, we were now becoming more than just friends who ate lunch together and talked in the hallways. We were becoming humans who had found a kindred spirit, someone to share our sacred words with, someone to confide our passions and sorrows in, someone to tell the complete and honest truth to. 

Now every part of the night that used to be just mine—the moments when everything is funny and my chest hurts from laughing, the moments when I feel inexplicably alone and my heart is breaking, the moments when unadulterated energy courses through my heart and through my soul—belongs to Jessie as well. 

So here’s to talking about all the movies we’re going to watch together, to listening to Harry Styles and various late night playlists, to making and consuming chai tea and other midnight snacks, to playing lagging computer games from our childhoods, to reading pages of our journals and notebooks aloud to each other, to finding a person to share those sacrosanct moments when the whole world is silent and we’re the only souls around.