It’s hard to say when it became a daily habit. There were stops and starts. Days when it wasn’t thought about. But little by little it became a non-negotiable. Wake up. Check the time. Send a snap. Every day, for 2,450 days straight. Almost seven years of fleeting moments, sent to a friend on the other side of the world.
Sarah has seen my sleepy eyes and the view of my dresser from my bed more than any other human on Earth. I don’t know why we decided our Snapchat streak would become all-important, but in April 2017, almost four years after we downloaded the app and started using it haphazardly, it became a priority.
We now have one of the longest snap streaks in the app’s history. We don’t know where we sit on the ladder because Snapchat doesn’t release that information, but we recently hit the Top 10 of a site that gathers that data.
Sarah and I met while teaching English in South Korea, an American and an Australian thrilled to be far from home. We forged a friendship over the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice and Korean sheet masks. Eventually we both returned to real life – journalism for me and grad school for her – but we kept in sporadic contact. Days, then weeks, then months would go by before we’d speak.
I missed my friend. I knew the big bits, but I missed the boring, the everyday intimacies that can keep you connected, even while saying nothing. Long phone calls might work to keep long-distance best friends close in the movies, but time differences have a way of keeping those short. It’s hard to fully delve into the vagaries of a crush, or the dramatics of a workday scandal at 10am on a Tuesday. Sarah likes to disconnect and cocoon, while I’m a moth to the social (media) flame, so Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (RIP) were never going to work. Text messages wouldn’t cut it because she didn’t have wifi at home (it was a different time). We tried letters, but they take time you don’t have – and care packages cost about a week’s grocery budget in postage.
The tyranny of distance came with a literal cost, which neither of us could afford. Eventually Sarah capitulated and downloaded Snapchat, an app more famous for hookups and nudes than keeping friendships alive, and we began sending each other random photos of our day. Her feet walking down a stained New York sidewalk in winter. My cat asleep in a sunbeam. Her cat asleep in a sunbeam. Tissues discarded on half a messy bed as my marriage broke down. Her ceiling on days the black dog wouldn’t let her leave her apartment. Eventually her name in my app list came with a little heart.
We were best friends on the app. She was my number one and I was hers.
Our first streak ended. It had gone on for almost two years at that point, but I think I forgot to send her a snap one day. Appeals to the powers that be at Snap failed, so we started again and swore to make it last.
Almost seven years, a divorce, four house moves, a career change, travel, two moves interstate, a book, a new relationship, a pandemic and a baby later, and we’ve kept that promise.
Snap became the thread that links us across the globe. Some days it’s just photos. Some days it’s a diary of images and videos. We hold conversations across the date line, one of us talking through a situation in little videos that the other answers 12 hours later when she wakes.
We’ve snapped each other from hospital beds, using the only energy we’ve had to keep the streak alive. We’ve snapped from bathroom and kitchen floors prostrate with grief. From airports when we didn’t know what day it was and from moments of such intense happiness you hope the love can be felt through the image. When Covid hit, Sarah and I were already in the habit of a virtual friendship – but our practice meant I immediately knew something was wrong when a timer appeared next to her name in the app, warning that we were close to the 24-hour expiry deadline for our streak.
She had been hit by Covid, hard. I rang and rang and rang until she picked up, her speech just gasps. She found medical help, while I sent food and Amazon care packages to her door, America’s online arteries connecting us through closed borders. Her Covid recovery was long and terrifying and I would wake up in a panic, only reassured back to sleep when I would see she had opened the app.
I asked her recently what the streak had meant to her and she said it was “just so comforting to have tangible proof that someone special is thinking of you at least once a day, even on our worst days” and that’s true. During some particularly hard moments, it had been the only voice I’d heard outside my head.
Research has found that adults need to spend about 220 hours or nine days together to become good friends. Sarah and I have spent countless hours together, beaming into each other’s faces and then disappearing into the ether. It’s like carrying your best friend around in your pocket, having them there for the best, worst and mundane parts of your life.
One day, Snapchat won’t exist. As a social media app, it’s never been the most popular and, like every commercialisation of human connection, it has never really worked out how to make money. But until that day, whenever it is, Sarah’s afternoons will be interrupted with an image of my tired face and a witty caption about the day, while I’ll be bestowed the sunset from her window in return. A prosaic image, sent to be forgotten, but each one whispering: I love you. Always.
