I THINK WE ALL JUST SHOWED UP?!

This weekend, because rain now apparently sends me digging through old crap I have been successfully ignoring for years, I found a box of faded photographs. College. Semester abroad. Evidence of a person I apparently was, in places I apparently went, with people I apparently knew well enough to be photographed with repeatedly, in multiple countries, across several years.

I studied these pictures for a long time. I look happy in them. I look like I know exactly what I'm doing.

I have no idea how I got there.

I have been thinking about this for days and I cannot figure it out. Not in a wistful, simpler times way — in a genuine forensic way, like trying to reconstruct a crime scene with no witnesses, no physical evidence, and a jury that keeps asking why you didn't just text someone. How did we ever make plans? How did any of us end up anywhere, with anyone, on any given Friday night, before the existence of a device that lives in our pocket and vibrates forty-seven times to confirm a dinner reservation?

I cannot remember, and I have tried.

My best working theory is word of mouth, which is both obviously true and completely insane when you say it out loud. Word. Of. Mouth. As if we were a traveling circus and someone had put up flyers. The information -- come to Sarah's at nine, wear green, Brian's parents are away -- somehow traveled from brain to brain across an entire high school without any mechanism I can specifically recall. Fifty people showed up. Fifty people somehow arrived at the same location at the same time.

I must have called people. On a phone attached to the wall in my kitchen, where my mother was also standing. But 50? I haven't called fifty people in the last decade combined. I am being asked to believe that I, at sixteen, was running a social logistics operation that would currently require a group chat, a backup group chat, and at least one person threatening to just stay home.

I can vividly recall the plans themselves — the diner booth with the ripped red vinyl, the party where someone threw up in someone else's Coach bag and we had to pretend that was fixable, the movie we saw three times because the theater didn't card — but the coordination that preceded any of it? Gone. A complete blackout. Like trying to remember being born.

College is somehow even less explicable. At least in high school there were lockers. Physical adjacency. A shared building that enforced daily contact and allowed plans to be made in person, in the hall, in the thirty seconds between second and third period. College was a campus! It was enormous. We were eighteen and theoretically autonomous and the logistics should have been a complete disaster, and yet somehow large groups of us kept ending up in the same places at the same time, having apparently agreed to this in advance through a process I cannot reconstruct at all.

Did someone knock on doors? Did we auto-renew plans at the end of the previous plans, reflexively, like a subscription nobody consciously signed up for? Same time next week? And then just... showed up?

I think the honest answer is that it worked because it had to. The plan was loose and we went anyway, and if we missed each other, so be it, and no one sent seventeen messages into the void cataloguing their emotional response to the miscommunication. We made new plans. We were at the mercy of the information we had, which was incomplete, and we treated that as normal, because it was.

My daughter can locate her friends in real time. She knows who is at whose house, who has left, who is on the way. The group chat is a living document, updated constantly — a collaborative record of where everyone is and what everyone thinks about where everyone is. It is extraordinarily efficient. No one ever shows up somewhere only to find that the plan has moved.

Although now the plan moves constantly. We have apps, location sharing, pinned messages, calendar invites, and somehow every outing still requires forty-three texts to execute. Wait are we outside or inside? Sorry running ten behind. Parking is insane. Can we push to 7:30? What's the vibe? The plan exists in a permanent state of revision until the moment you are physically sitting down, and sometimes not even then.

Back then, a plan was a declaration. Now it's an evolving conversation.

I'm not saying we had it better. I'm saying I genuinely don't know how we had it at all