The Inboxes of My Friends

We’ll see each other again soon.

ILKE GUNAY

“I’ll find you in every lifetime (threat).” The TikTok video I send to my friend Ceren shows two seagulls running after blue, crashing waves. It’s 1 AM here and I’m about to go to sleep. I’ll look at my phone first thing in the morning and see her response peeking at me on the screen: YES PLEASE DO.

I’ve grown more sentimental towards my friends nowadays. Anytime I see a post about being reincarnated together as cute bunnies or telling them that I’ll always be there, I press send. This is me reassuring them and myself that I’ll be coming back home soon. But I also wonder, do any of these posts feel as sentimental and genuine to them as they do for me? Do they just resent me for moving across the world for college? Can they sense how miserable I am without living this experience without any of them?

Then I get a call out of nowhere in the middle of the night. When I get back to the caller, we giggle for hours non-stop. Ceren texts me, “I have so much to tell you.” It turns into a 4 hour long Zoom meeting.

I open my inboxes to see the same funny, cheesy, reassuring posts sent from my friends. I’ll probably never know if they ever resent me or not, yet I know that 5,454 miles and 9 hours of time difference haven’t changed much for us. I can feel they still care about me.

I might be the friend that lives in their inboxes and missed calls, but I’ll find them and be next to them again in this lifetime; in every lifetime. And that is a threat.