It started, as most crises do, with a 🦖.
I’d just sent her a three-paragraph text about my day: thoughtful, well-punctuated, emotionally open. Her reply arrived eleven seconds later: a single dinosaur. No caption. No context. Just a T-Rex staring back at me from the screen, looking like it knew something I didn’t.
I stared at it for a full minute. Was she feeling short-armed and unheard? Ancient? Was this a threat? I finally typed “haha same” and hit send, feeling like a bomb technician cutting a random wire and just hoping for the best.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. She doesn’t text in sentences anymore; she texts in species. Last week, it was a lone 🙃—which I now know is never a happy face. It’s the universal symbol for smiling through the psychological horror of a current moment. Before that, it was a 🦐. I still think about that shrimp. Was it a culinary update? A subtle insult? A reference to sleeping curled up in a ball? I sent back a 🐳 out of pure ocean solidarity and never got an explanation.
Driven to desperation, I finally called her out right there in the chat. I told her I was going to buy an emoji dictionary. A real one. With definitions.
She read it instantly.
Her response? A single 🍍.
Nothing else. Just a pineapple sitting there, as if to say: Cute idea, but this one isn’t in your little book.
I don’t know what the pineapple meant. I never will. I closed the app, stared at the wall, and realised that no dictionary can save me now. She has, without ever uttering a word, invented her own language. And I am fluent in exactly none of it.