Screenshots and Games

I have a suspicion that time isn't really linear.

It's more like a curve, with a rather fuzzy starting point somewhere near the moment my first memories decided to appear.

Whenever I fly, something curious happens. Just after take-off, while the flight attendants demonstrate how to survive the unlikely event of a water landing over a country with very little water, and while the rustle of jackets and seatbelts settles into silence, I drift into a blue place where memories sprout like mushrooms after rain.

They are rarely dramatic memories.

More often, they are ordinary days from a past that is difficult to translate.

A time when children came home when the streetlights came on.

Or when their mother leaned out of the window and shouted their name with a volume that could probably be heard from space.

I see a thin little girl, all elbows and knees, running through the courtyard in front of a grey apartment block in Romania.

During the long summer days, we played hopscotch, tag, hide-and-seek, skipping rope, football, and games whose rules changed every five minutes depending on who was winning.

There were always ten or fifteen children outside.

Winter brought a different set of adventures: snowball battles, snowmen, and improvised sledding slopes.

If no sled was available, we used cardboard, plastic, or occasionally, kitchen equipment borrowed without permission.

There were dangers, too, from abandoned construction sites, underground garages, old cars, and drainage pipes.

Places that today would be surrounded by warning signs and liability forms.

Yet somehow our parents knew surprisingly little about what we were doing.

They gave us something that feels rare today: freedom. The results varied, but they were adventurous anyway- enough for several arguments, three friendships, and at least one dramatic declaration that someone would never speak to someone else again until the next day.

When I visited recently, I was surprised by the silence. The apartment blocks were the same, the trees were just older and taller, but the swings stood still.

The children were indoors, probably, or they had moved; there is no way to know, but I can imagine each with a tablet, a phone, a screen.

It felt as if the universe had somehow become smaller by the same amount as the tree grew taller. Still, the playground was there, but I got the strange feeling that the adventure had moved elsewhere.

Back then, the day began with a shout from below the window: "Come outside!" and there were no messages, no notifications, just a friend yelling loudly enough to wake half the block.

The day ended when the streetlights came on, signalling that it was time to return home.

Our way of measuring time was wonderfully inaccurate because most children didn't own watches, and many couldn't even read one.

The rhythm of the day was set by sunlight, hunger, and the increasingly urgent voice of your mother.

"Shit, shit," I heard from the couch, loud enough to cover the music from James' room.

"Why is everybody upset?" I asked.

I blinked, shaking my head incredulously.

"Hates foothy really, how came?"

"Apparently."

"What do you mean, apparently? I thought you guys went there to play, even if it wasn't school training."

He sighed the sigh of someone forced to explain modern civilisation to a person who still prints boarding passes.

"It started in the group chat."

"Ah, and as I learned many moons ago, almost every modern disaster begins with someone saying, 'It started in the group chat.'"

"So exactly what happened to spring this kind of conclusion?"

"Well, Jason wrote that Ryan didn't want to play footy after school."

"Maybe Ryan had homework."

"That's what I said."

My nephew nodded approvingly.

For a moment, I felt surprisingly modern.

"But then Dylan replied that Ryan probably didn't want to play because he likes reading."

I considered this.

"That doesn't sound too terrible."

"It wasn't. Yet."

"Yet?"

He handed me the phone.

The original message was harmless.

Ryan doesn't want to play footy.

Below it sat thirty-three comments.

The internet's version of archaeological layers, so I took my glasses and started winding back to see how each comment was buried slightly deeper in nonsense.

"He likes reading."

Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.

"He probably reads encyclopedias."

"Who even reads encyclopedias?"

This one made me laugh, especially when I thought of Wikipedia.

And from here on, they just went sideways.

"Next thing he'll be collecting stamps."

"Probably wears socks with sandals."

"Definitely reminds the teacher about homework."

"Wouldn't survive five minutes in the zombie apocalypse."

By this stage, poor Ryan had somehow transformed from a boy who didn't want to play football into a socially awkward professor of stamp collecting who was expected to perish immediately during a fictional catastrophe.

I looked up and tried to sound easy-breezy, like an Ozzie mum: 'Oh well, some people are really into chat these days and make it quite a journey on the wrong side of the tracks.'

My nephew nodded.

"We're only halfway."

There were another thirty comments.

Someone had created a meme.

Someone else had edited a photo with Ryan sandwiched under an encyclopedia, studying a stamp closely with a magnifying glass.

I know I wasn’t supposed to laugh, but it was funny in a sort of cruel way.

A third person had added dramatic music.

By the end of the afternoon, Ryan appeared to be an internationally recognised expert on insects, train timetables, and advanced mathematics.

None of which, as far as anyone knew, was true.

"What did Ryan say?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"He left the group."

We sat quietly for a moment.

These days, I keep folding the laundry, as looking at them directly seems to intrude on their inner world. Outside the window, a group of younger children were kicking a ball around.

One missed, and, as expected, another laughed, but five seconds later, they were all still playing together, so I pointed outside to deflect the sound toward their mother.

"You know, when I was your age, misunderstandings were much slower."

"How slow?"

"If somebody called you weird, they had to do it to your face."

My nephew laughed.

"That sounds awful."

"It had advantages."

"Such as?"

"By the time you'd walked across the courtyard, forgotten what you were angry about, and started another game, the argument was usually over."

He looked back at the screen.

The chat was still growing with more comments and more reactions.

More people explaining what Ryan supposedly meant, but strangely, nobody seemed interested in asking Ryan.

"That's the strange thing about group chats," I said.

"What?"

"The conversation moves faster than the friendship, and just for once, he didn't snap back immediately, and instead, he looked through the messages again. Then he shrugged in a “whatever way " that I can recognise straight away .

"You know what's funny?"

"What?"

"Ryan actually plays footy."

I laughed, no kidding, and here I was, wondering why you went so many times to kick up all that, even when it was raining cats and dogs.

"So why didn't he play yesterday?

My nephew grinned.

"He had to take his grandmother shopping."

As most mysteries do, the answer was simple. Then I realised that conversation hadn't disappeared from friendships: arguing, laughing, inventing worlds, and sharing secrets.

Only the stage has changed.

Sometimes I envy how quickly they connect. A message can cross a city in seconds.

In our day, if your friend wasn't downstairs, you simply had to wait and hope they would appear.

I wonder now if something is lost when everything happens so fast.

On a screen, courage can arrive with the tap of a thumb and wit can be polished quickly before pressing "send."

The perfect answer can be edited three times before anyone sees it ,but face-to-face, life moves differently.

There is no pause button, and no delete key, and nobody has those extra seconds to think of the clever thing you should have said.

Conversations slow down again.

Awkward silences return.

People become wonderfully imperfect.

Perhaps that is why I still love the memory of those noisy courtyards.

Not because today's children are missing but because back then, we had no choice but to learn from one another in real time.