Temporary Chat for Years

Once upon a time there were internet friends. They never met at a building entrance and did not know whose courtyard was whose; their courtyard was a telecommunication channel where voices gathered into one room without walls.

At first the little hangout-call came together quickly. Someone wrote “today?”, someone answered “in an hour,” and by evening microphones were rustling, someone laughed late because of ping, someone set tea beside the keyboard. The temporary chat was born like a match: a short flare, and everyone was already inside the light.

Then life thickened with work, moves, and different winters at different latitudes, but the gesture stayed the same: create a temporary chat, drop a link, agree on “soon.” That “soon” stretched first into a week, then a month, until the chat lay quiet like a forgotten postcard in a coat pocket; people were still friends, only the calendar between them had grown into a forest.

Sometimes the call happened after months. Sometimes after years. The chat’s name still promised “temporary,” while a whole epoch already lay inside: who had changed city, who had changed voice, who first heard a child in the background, who first heard silence after a long illness. When everyone finally joined, the hangout began almost as before, only the laughter arrived from another depth, as from a well they had dug too long and still reached.

So this fairy tale from reality keeps walking: the channel still holds the friends, and the time between “create chat” and “hear each other” learns to be long. The temporary turned out to be a form of loyalty, measured by patience between meetings.