Somewhere in the blur of 2020, as I slipped outside with a mask and running shoes in the early morning to walk around the block, the lilting drawl of a friend’s “hiiiiii” nearly stopped me in my tracks. It was the first voice note I remember clicking play on: a friend from our shared home state, Kentucky, talking me through a life update as we lived and worried and wondered about reaching out to one another from opposite sides of the country—me in DC and her on the West Coast. It felt like the surprise of an unexpected letter because we normally didn’t communicate that way, mixed with the convenience of a text—a compromise for people who wanted to catch up but whose schedules rarely matched.
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