I propped my head on a hand, seeing my own face bathed in purple LED lights on my computer screen. He, on the other side, was two thousand miles away, bathed in blue. We had been drinking for hours on a video call. It was December 2020, roughly 2:30am on an early Saturday morning. We were watching synchronized cartoons on Netflix. At 34 years old, I felt like I was a teenage girl with him tonight, despite the weight of my age and the pandemic.
He had been a stranger just six months before. A face on TikTok that I loved to see. I couldn’t have imagined in June of 2020 that he would be the person I would be closest to, in the pandemic. He had gone through his own challenges in 2020, and ultimately, we carried each other through, though we lived in different parts of the country. Hardly an hour went by without a text from him these days, and I needed those buzzes from my phone so desperately. With Christmas approaching, finding solace in each other as quarantined single people in a pandemic, I was more thankful for him in this moment than at any other time.
Tonight, we had just wrapped up a Twitch music stream, entertaining viewers whom we now considered friends with a playlist of our favorite emo songs. He was the digital “DJ”, his face on screen as he lip-synced along to emo music that wrapped his listeners in a warm blanket of nostalgia. I was once a fan, and now his moderator. What once was a pop punk party each Friday, lately felt like a curated lovey dovey playlist for each other. He’d slip songs into the stream that we had shared with each other via text while I was at work, and he was at the gym. He’d sing his praises for me on stream — much to the dismay of viewers who wished they could be the recipient of such sweet words.
On this night, I was still warm with the sound of the music and his quiet singing, many hours after the stream had ended.
“You forgot to turn your mic off,” I remembered texting him, mid-stream.
The livestream showed his dark eyes flit up to the webcam as he realized his listeners could hear him singing along to the best emo hits of the early 2000s. And then back to his phone to respond to me.
“Well that’s a first.” He texted back.
“I thought it was cute.”
“Well that’s another first.” With all these viewers watching him, this backdoor text conversation while he was live on stream felt like one of my most treasured possessions.
Music was what bound us. We reveled in sharing songs with this group of people in their early 30s who soaked up every track by Taking Back Sunday and The Early November. We playfully disputed the values of Spotify and Apple Music. But tonight there was no dispute. And right now it was just me and him.
As he shared his browser screen with me in our video chat, I dashed to grab another beer, and returned to find him looking for music videos on YouTube.
“Have you seen this one?” He asked, hitting play on a video from an artist we both loved; music that was just meant for me and him to share, that would never fit into our nostalgic emo streams. I hadn’t seen it, and I said so, cracking the beer directly into my mic. He shook his head and rolled his eyes. I oscillated between drunkenly appreciating his tired face, resting on arms folded on his desk, and the music video. He was beautiful in so many ways, and I loved him for so many reasons. What an incredible feeling to have for someone I would never meet in person.
Once, as he entertained listeners on stream, a viewer lamented within the chat “I wish we could all hang out…” He instantly responded, with a gusto that nearly stopped the playlist he curated: “We ARE hanging out!”
It had become a bit of a mantra for me and him. When I couldn’t quite tell if he was looking at me on a Zoom call: “Ash, we are hanging out.” When I had to cancel my trip to see him to visit my ailing father: “I’ll plan a stream, we are hanging out.” It was a remote tenderness that will, to this day, be hard to rival with in-person closeness.
The YouTube algorithm worked its magic, playing video after video. Losing his grip on consciousness and sobriety, he only occasionally clicked a new video, coaching the algorithm in the direction he wanted. We were quiet. The ring light behind my webcam felt warm. He let the songs play. Things, amid a global pandemic, were okay here. With him. Remotely.
A YouTube track began that made him perk up momentarily.
“Well huh.”
“Do you know this one?”
“No. But it’s good. It’s REALLY good.”
I smiled. “Wait, is this how you find new music?” He was an expert at finding new tracks to share with the group. Tracks that sounded just enough like the emo music they loved, while still being fresh and modern. I was never sure how he developed that uncanny ability — assuming he had some haughty resources to find the best new music — but just now I was clued into the secret sauce.
He took a swig of whiskey; a bottle I’d sent him as an early Christmas gift. “Yeah, doesn’t everyone?”
“Only people who don’t use Spotify,” I quipped, and he huffed a sarcastic laugh.
The sounds of this night would come to remind me of this time with him months later. Of this time in my own darkened apartment and he in his, in a different part of the country. I hoped the songs would one day remind him of me, just the same.
He went quiet again, and for a time I watched him feeling the music. Despite his DJing an “emo” music stream, he would never admit to the way this music made him feel. I could nearly see him experiencing his break-up all over again, bonding with his brother, trying to understand his mother’s death, with each song that played. We never were physically close, but in these moments of new music discovery, we couldn’t have been closer. I asked him to stop clicking when he reached a track I knew, and he patiently waited as I quietly sang along, the corners of his mouth turning up slightly at my happiness. In the six months I’d known him virtually, I learned he had this way of softly exhaling through his nose when he was content. With this song playing, that soft exhale in my headphones felt like a gentle breath on my cheek. It was a flirting that was always palpable between us, but never spoken. It bugged me when his viewers on-stream joked about it. I wanted it to remain this innocent; this secret between us that even we couldn’t speak.
In our drunkenness, over the sound of new music, we got to talking about our aspirations and our dreams. We both wanted to build our own cabins in the woods, and we talked about this often. I’d been holding off on showing him the property I really wanted: a nearly-falling-down shack on a nearby island. But tonight, I sent him a link for it.
He pulled up the listing on his screen, and fell quiet again for several seconds. I held my breath and searched his eyes through the pixels.
“Ash, you need this. You have to buy this.” I watched as he clicked through the photos of it. Then, he looked at me (or rather, the digital display of me on his screen.) I knew he was drunk, but he was suddenly more emotional than I’d seen him before. He looked like he was on the verge of tears. I smiled slightly.
“I would buy it for you.” He said, “You know I have that home loan.”
“You can’t-”
“I mean I’d help you work on it, too.”
“I’ve never even met you! Besides, I wouldn’t let you use your loan on a place you don’t live-”
“Who said I wouldn’t live there?” He smiled a lopsided, drunken, flirty grin. My heart felt like it was falling down a flight of stairs. I would have done anything to get on a plane to be with him, at that moment. My TikTok crush. My pandemic confidante. The DJ whom I’d ultimately never meet. “Ash, you deserve this. You have done so much for me. For all of us in this music community.” I swiped at my eyes, unsure if the beer was amplifying my feelings for what was happening.
He didn’t tell me then about the gift that I would receive in the mail just before Christmas: the biggest bag of Legos I’d ever seen. “I can’t wait to see what you build. Love you.”
How strange, then, that when the world healed from the pandemic, he healed from me. The tenderness of that time, the deep emotions of two people who propped each other up, loved and inspired each other will never be lost on me. But it simply couldn’t exist when the world opened up again. I wonder all the time what he’s doing now. Which restaurants he’s going to — now that that’s a thing we can do again. Which movies he’s seeing. Which girls are loving him like I did. But this time — in person.
We are hanging out, always, if only in the digital videos that are still captured online. Only in those Zoom calls. In our theater of the mind. In our remote spaces. In our memories of the pandemic.
“Will you fall asleep with me?” I asked him, and he said yes. We carried our phones to bed, faces changing in lights that passed overhead, and glanced at each other in mostly blackened screens as we drifted into strange, fretful, drunken dreams — simultaneously, from different parts of the globe.
