After a drawn-out battle on life support spanning multiple months, your college friends group chat passed peacefully of natural causes July 15, 2020, when you typed “Miss you ladies” into your phone and were about to click send, but then decided, upon further reflection, you didn't actually miss those ladies.
The Champaign, IL-born group chat is survived by more relevant group chats in your phone—one for work friends, one for Pilates friends, and one for family.
The college group chat will be fondly remembered for its many colorful names, conferred by different members of the chat across its 11 years of existence. At first, the chat was labeled “College Friends,” but that moniker developed into “College Slutzzz,” which was promptly altered to “CoLLeGe CuTiEs,” as soon as the era of Me Too took hold. In its final iteration, the group chat label was simply a string of emojis whose connections to inside jokes have long been forgotten.
This 11-year old text thread was the first of its kind that its erstwhile members used as a collective brain dump for their passing thoughts—an attempt to perform closeness, despite residing in cities sprinkled across the globe. The chat was known as a stomping ground for fun observations, snarky complaints, and words of encouragement, all of which became increasingly sparing as time wore on.
Now and then, the chat was also a place where members sought advice over serious concerns—the sort of intimations they now save for people who are more actively present in their lives and therefore require less explanatory context.
The memorial for the group chat will be held in the private thoughts of all previous group chat members. Individually, you will each try to convey your social network’s changed dynamics to significant others who don’t have the bandwidth to listen, considering they have their own aging college group chats to care for.
The college group chat will be honored with passing mentions such as, “Wow it’s crazy how much we’ve grown apart” and “It sucks that we never got to do that road trip we were semi-planning, because of COVID and everything.” (The group chat’s passing, though it coincides with the pandemic, was not due to COVID-related complications.)
In lieu of flowers, those closest to the group chat are asking for donations to your alma mater, which they are trying to desperately cling on to.