The night the call kept freezing

Saving this here because I keep meaning to and then not. Mostly so I remember it happened and didn't just feel like it happened.

Started around 9:40, maybe 9:50. I had the lamp off and only the kitchen light on down the hall, which I mention because later it mattered, the light, sort of, in a way I'll get to.

Her video froze almost right away. Not the whole thing, just her face, mid-word, mouth slightly open like she was about to say a vowel. Audio kept going for a second or two and then that went too. I sat there looking at the frozen vowel face.

9:53 me: youre frozen 9:53 me: like a statue lol 9:54 me: ok now youre back

She wasn't back. That was me being optimistic. The little spinning thing in the corner kept spinning.

I think the issue was the Wi-Fi. We're four units sharing the one router downstairs, the landlord set it up that way before I moved in and nobody's ever fixed it, and at night everybody's home and everybody's streaming something. So by ten o'clock it's basically a hallway with too many people in it. I'd forgotten about that. I always forget about that until the exact moment it matters.

She typed instead of talking, which I've started to do too, you type first to explain why you've gone quiet so the other person doesn't think you've gone quiet at them. That's the thing nobody tells you. The lag isn't the problem. The problem is the half second where you wonder if the other person just stopped wanting to talk. So you type. "sorry buffering" before they can decide you're being cold.

9:58 her: i think its on my end 9:58 her: hold on 9:59 her: my brother is downloading something. a game i think 9:59 her: pausing it 10:00 her: ok i paused it. or i stopped it idk it asked me are you sure and i said yes

She stopped her brother's download. Somewhere in another apartment a progress bar went still and her brother probably had no idea why. I found that very funny for reasons I can't totally explain. The idea of us reaching across the city and quietly stopping a stranger's video game so we could see each other's faces.

It helped a little. Her video came back, choppier than normal but back, moving in those small jumps like an old flipbook. Every few seconds it would catch up to itself all at once, four gestures compressed into one. She'd lift her hand and then suddenly her hand was already down and holding the mug.

I switched myself to the phone hotspot to see if that was better. It wasn't really better. It was differently bad. The hotspot has its own moods. But for a minute there it felt like progress, like we were doing something about it instead of just enduring it.

10:06 me: can you hear me now 10:06 me: now? 10:07 her: i can hear you but you sound underwater 10:07 her: said you sound like a water? a water thing? 10:07 me: underwater 10:08 her: oh lol i thought you said water thing and i was confused

I didn't say water thing. But for a second she thought I'd said water thing and I kind of wish I had, it's a better word for how I sounded, all warbly and slow.

The thing that actually worked, and I only figured this out by accident, was that I stopped moving. I'd been leaning back and forth, gesturing, getting up to get water, and every time I moved the video got worse, like the connection had to spend all its effort just tracking me. When I went still it smoothed out. So I sat very still, which feels strange on a call, you feel like you're being weird and formal, but it worked. I told her and she went still too and we sat there like two people in an old painting and the video held.

Then she said go toward the door. Or toward the router. Hers is in the hall and she said when she stands near the door of her room it's better, something about the wall, the wall between her and the hallway is the problem. So she got up and the video swung around, ceiling, lamp, a poster I couldn't make out, and then settled and she was sitting on the floor by her door with her back against the frame and she said is this better and it was. It really was. Whatever the wall was doing, the doorway undid some of it.

I don't have a good spot like that. My router's in a place I can't get near without sitting in the bathroom, which I was not going to do. So I just stayed still in my underwater chair.

There's a stretch around 10:20 to 10:35 that I don't have any record of because we actually managed to just talk, choppy but talking, and I wasn't typing so there's nothing saved. I remember she told me about her week and the part where her video froze on a particular expression, half a laugh, and stayed there for almost a full minute while her audio kept going, so I was listening to her laugh at something while her face held perfectly still mid-laugh, and it should have been unsettling but it wasn't, it was almost nice, like a photo with sound.

10:38 her: ok its getting bad again 10:38 her: i think everyone in my building came home 10:39 me: ours too. its the 10pm everyone exists problem 10:39 her: the what 10:40 me: when everyone gets home and the internet remembers theres other people 10:40 her: lol yeah

We'd met on Knot.chat months ago, which feels relevant only because the whole thing started as two faces on a screen and here we still were, two faces on a screen, except now the screen freezing felt like an interruption of something instead of the thing itself.

The part I keep relearning is not to read the lag as her pulling away. When her face freezes mid-sentence the dumb jumpy part of my brain goes she's bored, she's done, and it's wrong every single time, it's just the router downstairs and four neighbors and somebody's brother's game. The freeze means nothing. I have to keep telling myself the freeze means nothing.

10:51 her: i should sleep 10:51 her: this is exhausting. fighting the internet 10:52 me: yeah 10:52 me: it was good though. even underwater 10:53 her: underwater 10:53 me: underwater

She left the call still sitting by her door, I think, the last frame I got of her was the doorframe and her shoulder. I sat in the chair a while after. The kitchen light was still on down the hall.

Anyway. That was the call. Writing it down before it turns into just a feeling.