Rashad: The Phantom Warmth

On the intimacy of someone who texts you at 11pm but will never stay till morning.

There is a particular kind of hunger that has nothing to do with food. It arrives quietly, usually sometime between midnight and the hour when sensible people are already dreaming. It announces itself not with a growl, but with a glow — the screen lighting up, and that name, that name, appearing like a small blue miracle in the dark.

Rashad walked in like a breeze into my life. We met at a friends backyard party when we were in our late 20s. That time in life, where you want everything to be spontaneous, fun and are seeking cheap thrills.

His closely shaved head, round jaw, and beautifully smooth dark skin made a striking contrast with his bright white teeth. Killer smile. He wore Gucci sneakers, an AP watch and an Armani suit that rested perfectly on his shoulders.

He offered me a drink, and sat annoyingly close to me. The smell of oud half intoxicating half smelling like a huge mistake I’d love to make.

I couldn’t help but wonder: have we become a generation of soulhunters, forever stalking connection through the underbrush of our own devices?

He wasn’t my boyfriend. He wasn’t even my almost. He was my texter — a category of person that previous centuries simply did not have the technology to produce. Every evening around ten, he’d materialize with some variation of “thinking of you” and a follow-up that could, depending on your imagination, mean almost anything. I always chose to imagine something flattering. Something warm. Something that left just enough unsaid to fill an entire sleepless hour.

The casual text companion is a peculiarly modern creature. They exist in the soft space between a stranger and a lover — too familiar to be one, too untethered to be the other. They know your coffee order and your worst habit and exactly which joke will make you laugh against your will at 11:43pm. What they don’t know or pretend not to, is where this is going. And somehow, impossibly, that is precisely the point.

There is an eroticism to the ellipsis. The three dots that appear and disappear on a screen carry more tension than most first kisses. You are being considered. Someone, somewhere, is thinking about what to say to you, which means they are thinking about you, which means: well. It means something. Even if neither of you will say what.

Eventually Rashad faded into the past. It was always clear the romance was short lived and had an expiration date that wasn’t rooted in “future talk”.

My friend Miranda calls it “emotional snacking.” You’re not getting a meal, she says. You’re getting someone handing you a piece of bread through a window and asking if you’re hungry. And the shameful truth is that sometimes — often — the bread is enough. It is warm and it is meant for you and you eat it standing up in the cold, and you call that nourishment.

But I think Miranda’s missing something. There is a soul in the hunt itself. The seeking, the being-sought. The way your thumb hovers before you reply, performing a casual indifference you absolutely do not feel. You are, in these moments, magnificently, electrically alive — because someone on the other side of a glowing rectangle is also hovering, also slightly unsure, also feeling the specific, exquisite voltage of mutual wanting that has no official name and no designated future.

We are all, in our way, Soulhunting. Not for a soulmate, necessarily that word feels so final, so one-size-fits-all. We are hunting for the feeling of being known, even briefly. Of being someone’s 11pm thought. Of mattering enough to be typed to. Of mattering enough to be met in daylight in a museum shop.

Is that so different from love? Or is it just love, running on airplane mode?

In a city full of people staring at their phones, I had to wonder — are we texting because we’re lonely, or are we lonely because we know, somewhere under all that wanting, that a text will never be enough?

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