voice notes
platonic loves
Back in November, I wrote about the kind of love found in friendships—the quiet, steady kind that doesn’t ask for much but gives endlessly. I mentioned a friend of mine who was moving to Lisbon, half-expecting that distance would do what it always does: unravel the threads of closeness, soften the edges of routine. But S is not like that. She grips friendships with both hands and pulls them even closer. She folds the pages of the map until you’re right there beside her, the miles between us shrinking into nothing. I am endlessly grateful that she is built this way.
The first voice note she ever sent was, I’m almost certain, a practical one. She was running late for a coffee date, and rather than a rushed text, she sent me a three-minute message. The lilting, “Heyyy, sweetie” startled me. It was unexpected, intimate in a way that a text could never be. When she moved, I assumed our conversations would dwindle into occasional check-ins. Instead, a few weeks ago, she sent me four voice notes of varying lengths, but each of them over 15 minutes long. I responded in kind, each of us unfurling thoughts in the space between time zones.
There is something special about a voice note. It lives in the in-between. A phone call demands presence, and a text is stripped of life. But a voice note captures something that other forms of communication cannot — the tone of a voice on the edge of laughter, the way someone’s breath catches as they pause to find the right words, the unguarded moments that slip through when we think no one is really listening.
They come with their own rituals—the brief pre-amble justifying the voice message, the inevitable self-scolding for rambling, the startled realisation of just how long we’ve been talking. There’s an honesty to them, a closeness. Unlike texts, they don’t allow for meticulous edits or perfectly curated responses. They are wonderfully imperfect, words tumbling out in real time. Texts can feel vacuous, like empty words in space. But voice notes have substance — they fill the gaps in the distance just by the rustle of movement in the background or the sound of footsteps as we wander from room to room, carrying the conversation with us. And in that way, they feel more like a presence than a message, more like companionship than conversation. But, unlike a phone call, a voice note waits for you. It's a thread you can pick up right where you left off. A never-ending phone call, stretching across days. A conversation without a goodbye.
And then, there’s the artistry of them—the thirty-minute limit capturing the rise and fall of a good story, the thrill of a bit of gossip, or the tangle of a work dilemma. Sometimes it’s deeper than that. Sometimes it’s just feelings. You press record, and what spills out is raw and unfiltered, a truth laid bare in the rhythm of speech.
At first, I felt self-conscious, unsure why anyone would want to listen to me monologue for thirty minutes. But now, I delight in the rambling, the awkward pauses, the moments when I have to stop for a sip of water because I’ve talked myself parched. When S sends me long voice notes, I open a Notes page, jotting down responses to each of her thoughts. It’s a whole ordeal, a delightful kind of fanfare.
And really, that’s what I love most about it—not just the stories themselves, but the act of telling them. The way a friend narrates a grocery run, vents about a frustrating boss, or simply wants to know what’s been on my mind lately. It’s a small act of love, I think, to want to talk to someone—however you choose to do it.