#jeef

JALAPENO.

jalapeno p.o.v <3

To leave social media is an odd breath of fresh air, even if that fresh air is still a little stale from the events from the night before. I know I shouldn't have cared. The jokes shouldn't have mattered. I'm still not certain if the issue was the attention or the subject itself. It couldn't have been the subject, it's not like any of the jokes were true, or close to true. We were twitter friends. That's all.

Things were awkward for a day or two. The embarrassing part was that I knew a lot of it was in my head. I knew that I had a habit of overthinking myself into a long, dreaded spiral, but I knew it would fade as well. Things would go back to normal, and they did.

Even when I had my twitter deactivated I checked into streams, scared that my fear of missing out would run rampant if I did otherwise. I didn't talk, finding solace in the idea that if I stayed quiet I couldn't become more embarrassed than I already was. I didn't really talk to Beef during that time. We didn't talk enough for that to be weird or odd, but after he interrupted Wonderbread's stream, I couldn't help but wonder what he was thinking.

Speaking of, I kept watching Wonderbread, as per usual. I knew that he was aware I deactivated, as he was still active on twitter at the time and we all assumed that was why Beef walked in on his stream the other night after leaving. Wonderbread said that he wanted to reach out and see if I was doing okay. So I spoke, and that was kind of the thing that broke the ice again. You don't realize how much you are overthinking until the dust settles and the waves calm and you realize everything is as okay as it was before, even if they're a little different.

Things were typical for a long while. Regular twitter conversations, regular stream viewing. Nothing exciting, nothing unusual. When Beef found out why I deactivated he thought I sounded silly. Irrational, almost. Maybe I was, but I still wonder what he was thinking that whole time. Maybe he didn't think about it at all.

Phone calls are always so completely different from messaging. Responses are instantaneous. You don't have time to form the perfect response. It's just a conversation, a genuine conversation. I think phone calls are a great way to see if you fit a person. As a friend, I mean.

Do the conversations flow? Or are they stagnant and stiff? When there is silence, is it comfortable? I always thought that there was little silence in our phone calls. Mostly because any quiet was filled slightly by my laughter. I laughed a lot when I was on the phone with him, and when the laughter died out, I was left smiling at my empty phone screen.

It, again, wasn't a big deal to me. I call friends all of the time. We talked for a while about everything and anything, about ourselves and our lives. I told my friends, knowing full well they would run and scream with the new content for jokes and fun. But, aside from that, there wasn't anything crazy about the call. Nothing super dramatic or climactic. It was just a phone call. Mostly.

"I don't like my houseplant," Beef said over the phone. I forget what our segway was into this topic. But I just listened. "I liked it for a long time, but things are just different now. I don't know."

It was weird to hear. Sad to hear. I didn't know a lot about Beef and his houseplant. But it's never easy to separate yourself from something that you once spent so much time around. It's hard to get through the phase of denying the change that is meant to happen. I just felt bad. I wished there were more I could do, but all I could do was sympathize.