One Saturday morning, a few weeks ago, I sat in my living room staring at my phone, writing

Eli a text.

Now most of Eli and I's text conversations are pretty boring.

I would describe them as thoughtless snippets of consciousness, or just necessary daily

transactional exchanges.

A scroll through our text thread would show about 90% of it are texts that say things like

call you in two minutes, or does 830 still work.

And when it's not something functional like that, you might see something random out

of nowhere, like a no-context TV show quote like I got from Eli last week, where he just

wrote, I just couldn't get away, capital G was down to his boxers.

A text surely sent while Eli was rewatching an arrested development episode.

The point is, not much thought goes into our texts.

So it was odd that one Saturday morning, a few weeks ago, I found myself hunched over

my phone, typing, backspacing, retyping, and putting a lot of thought into trying to find

the right words to text to Eli.

I even opened up my notes app and typed it in there like I do in my boss text me a question.

And I want to craft a concise, smart looking response, but I don't want to sit there and

finagle it on the text thread so you can see the three dots starting and stopping, and

how long it's taking me to come up with this answer that I want him to think I know

the answer to faster than I actually do.

But in this case, I wasn't answering a question.

Eli was headed to the course for a round, and Eli was low on confidence.

...