Paper Trails

On texting and tennis

WhatsApp abandons me every summer. Last year, my friend Sophia and I, expats during a languid Oxford July, decided to host a Fourth of July party, only partially to force our European friends to listen to “Party in the U.S.A.” on repeat. After I made a group chat, WhatsApp concluded that our emoji-laden party invitation was spam, and blocked me from accessing my contacts or sending messages for a week. This was at best kind of charming — my life became a lot more spontaneous — and at worst really annoying. I couldn’t tell my friends I was running late, I couldn’t respond to anyone’s messages. Digital disconnection sounds relaxing but practically, it’s paralyzing.

Two weeks ago, WhatsApp crashed while I was sending a message from my laptop. When I logged in again, my messages were gone, leaving just the vacant ghosts of every group chat I’ve been part of since I downloaded the app.

In the ten days since I’ve studied and sat for two chemistry exams, taken three flights, and visited four cities. There wasn’t much time to process losing that archive. But it’s been bothering me this weekend, and I’m trying to think through why. I keep a lot — there’s a big plastic bin in my childhood bedroom with every journal, photo booth strip, birthday card, newspaper clipping and lanyard of my first 22 years. I hold on to a disconnected, defunct iPhone from a decade ago in case one day I figure out how to extract the messages from a friend who’s passed away.

Text messages are inherently ephemeral. They’re utilitarian, and most of mine are replete with information I no longer need — links to out-of-date New Yorker articles, confirmation of what time I’m meeting friends. I know people who purge their messages as soon as a given conversation is over. During the pandemic, and in the months since I moved, I’ve maintained many of my relationships through digital encounters. I like the records of how those exchanges have unfolded, even when I wouldn’t have documented them otherwise. I feel a nebulous grief that I can’t access them, but I’m trying to embrace it.

I think there’s a fine line to tread between sentimental and excessive documentation. The internet enables and encourages this over-the-top record keeping. Instagram is a good example. As tweens and teenagers in the early days of our digital lives, my friends and I would hang out at friend’s houses for photoshoots. We’d crowd into a bathroom and test Sephora lipstick samples and clumpy Maybelline mascara, then head to the backyard for a series of group and individual poses. Later, we’d painstakingly select *the* shot for an Instagram post. Over the past few years, public health experts and policymakers have increasingly scrutinized how social media sites impact the mental health of teenagers. I confess I’m amused when middle aged men express shock that these platforms warp young people’s self-perception — most 13 year old girls could have said the same in 2013.

So much work, anxiety and performance to produce a single image for our friends to scroll past. So much excess for something both so fleeting and so effectively documented. Half of my life later, I still have some of those pictures on my Instagram feed. But there’s something that feels more poignant about my messy, plastic-tub archive than the contents of my text messages or the curated pictures on my tweenage social media. All of these mediums capture transitory moments, from summer camp memories to mid-commute conversations. But the physical archive feels more real, even if I can’t remember what year my friend sent this birthday card or who gave me that friendship bracelet. I know that in the photos on my Instagram, I was performing — maybe for a cute boy in my grade, maybe for the cool girls at my new school. More likely for both. The internet makes the excess and performance of documentation so seductive, yet something about it is still unreal, disconnected from the truth of my memories. So many ways to keep records in the digital age and it’s still so hard to be true to experience.

Snce it’s Wimbledon and I loveeee tying tenuous threads together, I’ll close with this: I think it’s revealing to look to tennis sportswriting. Anyone who’s ever played tennis with me can testify to my striking lack of hand-eye coordination, but I love watching the game. I find the rhythms soothing, the athleticism mesmerizing, the ATP gossip entertaining. It’s all so fleeting — the ball grazes the ground and then it’s off, the opponent’s at the baseline and then they’re at the net. The players are in constant motion, the state of play is always evolving. As Federer put it in his commencement speech at Dartmouth last year, just as soon as it starts, the point is over. There’s just the next point, and then the next. How could you possibly capture that motion with the written word? What’s so powerful about the attempt?

Maybe this all isn’t so novel to the digital world. Maybe it’s just human — this instinct to try and capture and preserve what’s fleeting.

If you want some great tennis writing —

David Foster Wallace on Federer (obviously)

Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played — Jon Wertheim

andddd Rafa: My Story — Rafa Nadal. Shhhh. It’s literature.

Alcaraz in 3 next year,

Ellen