The Things We Didn't Know We Were Doing for the Last Time

We knew when the big things were ending. The ordinary things just disappeared.

Nobody tells you it’s the last time

At some point, you logged into AIM and that was it.

You didn’t know it. You weren’t saying goodbye.

You signed on like you had a thousand times before. Checked who was online. Read a few away messages. Changed your profile. Maybe talked to somebody.

Then you signed off.

There was no reason to remember it. AIM had simply become a little less important than it used to be. Texting was easier. Facebook was there. Everyone was slowly moving somewhere else.

That’s how most of this happened.

We remember the endings that announce themselves. The last day of school. Your final game. Moving out of your first apartment. You know you’re supposed to look around and take it in.

But nobody told you to pay attention when you printed MapQuest directions, burned a CD, called someone’s house, or left home knowing nobody could reach you.

You were just living your life.

And then one day, without noticing, you were living it differently.

When leaving meant being unreachable

Someone calls your house.

“He just left.”

That used to settle the matter.

There wasn’t an immediate follow-up question about whether they’d tried your cell. Nobody opened Find My Friends. There wasn’t a group chat where somebody could write, where are you???

You had left.

If someone needed you, they could try wherever they thought you were going. They could wait for you to get there. They could leave a message with your mother. Or they could simply fail to reach you.

And none of this meant you were deliberately disconnecting.

You weren’t taking a mental-health break. You hadn’t turned on Do Not Disturb. You weren’t being mindful.

You went outside.

Eventually cell phones changed what it meant to leave the house. Smartphones changed it again. Now being unreachable usually requires a dead battery, bad service, or a conscious decision to make yourself unavailable.

For most of your childhood, disappearing for a few hours wasn’t disappearing at all.

It was leaving the house.

When the plan had to be the plan

Being unreachable meant plans had to survive without constant maintenance.

“Meet us outside the theater at seven.” “Your mom’s picking us up by Sears at 9:30.”

“If we get separated, meet at the bike racks.” That was the plan.

You couldn’t send never mind, we’re over by the food court now. You couldn’t drop a pin. You couldn’t watch somebody’s little blue dot move through the parking lot.

If you said you’d be somewhere, the other person went there and looked for you.

And sometimes they weren’t there. So you waited. Five minutes, then ten, then fifteen.

At some point you had to start making decisions with almost no information. Did they forget? Are they still coming? Did their parents say no? Am I standing at the wrong entrance? Should I leave to look for them and risk having them arrive thirty seconds later?

This wasn’t better. It was frequently annoying as hell.

We solved it because it was a problem worth solving. Texting somebody I’m here is much easier than standing outside a movie theater wondering whether you’ve been abandoned.

But plans worked differently when you couldn’t keep changing them after everyone left home.

You had to decide where you were going before you went.

Getting lost used to mean getting lost

MapQuest was miraculous right up until you missed a turn.

You had the directions printed beside you, possibly folded in half, with a sequence of instructions that worked perfectly as long as you remained exactly where MapQuest expected you to be.

Turn right onto Route 9. Continue 4.2 miles. Turn left onto a road you’ve never heard of. Miss that left and things could deteriorate quickly, because the paper didn’t recalculate.

You could keep driving and hope you recognized something. Turn around. Pull into a gas station and ask somebody. Dig a road atlas out of the glove compartment. Call the person you were visiting and attempt the deeply inefficient process of explaining your surroundings.

There’s a Dunkin’ and I think a Mobil.

Today you can miss six consecutive turns and your phone will continue inventing new ways to rescue you from yourself.

Back then, you could be lost. Not GPS says we’re three minutes slower now lost. No one in this car knows where we are lost.

And somehow, eventually, you usually got there.

You couldn’t look up what was ahead

Road trips contained more unknowns because of it.

You knew the destination. You might know the major highways. But you couldn’t inspect every mile between here and there before leaving.

A billboard told you there was a restaurant at Exit 14.

Someone saw a place from the road and said, “That looks good,” so you stopped. Maybe it was good. Maybe it was terrible. Maybe for the next ten years your family talked about the weird restaurant you found in Pennsylvania because everyone was hungry and somebody saw a sign.

There were guidebooks, AAA maps and recommendations, of course. None of this was the Dark Ages. People planned vacations.

But you couldn’t stand in an unfamiliar town, pull a rectangle out of your pocket and immediately see every nearby restaurant ranked by thousands of strangers.

The world revealed itself more slowly.

Sometimes this sucked.

There is nothing romantic about desperately needing a bathroom while everyone in the car argues about whether there was a rest area on the sign six miles ago.

The information is useful. That’s why we wanted it.

We just used to encounter more things before we had a chance to research them.

Your away message was trying to tell somebody something

AIM was theoretically a piece of communications software.

In practice, it was also a teenage identity-management system.

Your screen name mattered. Your profile mattered. And the away message, which supposedly existed to tell people you weren’t sitting at the computer, could be doing an astonishing amount of emotional work.

Song lyrics, inside jokes, a quote, some cryptic sentence that appeared to mean nothing but was absolutely intended to be read by one specific person.

If you were mad at somebody, there was no need to name names. That’s what Dashboard Confessional was for.

Twenty years later, we’re still sitting at computers sending instant messages to people whose online status we can see.

Except now it’s Slack and Teams.

The little dot still tells everyone whether you’re there. Your screen name is your actual name. Your picture may be your corporate headshot. Your status says:

In a meeting. Focus time. Back at 2:30.

We didn’t stop using instant messenger. We made it get a job.

The same basic technology that once let teenagers publicly communicate heartbreak through pop-punk lyrics now helps determine whether Greg from Finance is available for a quick sync.

You had to wait for the pictures

You could take 24 pictures and have absolutely no idea whether you’d taken 24 good pictures.

Usually, you hadn’t.

The camera went to CVS or wherever your family developed film. Then you waited.

When the envelope came back, seeing the photographs was its own event.

Someone’s eyes were closed. The flash hadn’t worked. A finger covered part of the lens. There were three inexplicable pictures of nothing.

And then sometimes there was a great one. Not because anyone had taken 40 versions and selected the most flattering. There was one picture. Everybody happened to look good.

That’s the picture.

Digital cameras shortened the wait. Phones eventually eliminated it.

Now the instinct after taking a group photo is almost immediate:

Let me see.

For most of our lives, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

For part of them, it would have made no sense.

There was a last one, somewhere

You probably don’t know what the final CD you ever burned was.

You certainly didn’t label it FINAL BURNED CD.

You made it because you wanted those songs together. Maybe you wrote the track list on it with a Sharpie. Maybe it went into your car.

And then you never made another.

The same thing happened with the MapQuest printout, the roll of film, the answering-machine message you came home and checked, the AIM profile update, the iPod you loaded before going somewhere, and calling someone’s house to ask their parent if they were home.

These things didn’t all disappear at once, and they didn’t disappear for everyone at the same time. Some of them haven’t disappeared completely.

You can buy a disposable camera right now. You can turn your phone off. You can drive somewhere without GPS. You can probably burn a CD, assuming you can first locate a computer willing to participate.

But choosing to recreate a limitation isn’t the same as living in a world where there wasn’t another option.

The old world didn’t close on Friday and the new one open Monday morning.

The new thing was simply a little more convenient. Then more people had it. Then you started using it more often. Then one day the old way felt unusual.

By then, the last time had already happened. Nobody told you to pay attention.

Somewhere there was a completely ordinary afternoon when you left the house and nobody could reach you. You came home later.

At some point, you logged off AIM and never logged back in. You printed your final MapQuest directions. You burned one more CD. None of it felt important enough to remember.

Maybe the final away message should have been:

Well, I guess this is growing up.