“Those status messages,” you say. “What were they like?” As thunderous piano-accompanied art songs were to the sad young men of Romantic Germany, so were status messages to us. They might have a succinct description of our emotional state. Often they consisted of the quotation of vitally important song lyrics: from The Postal Service, from Dashboard Confessional, from blink-182, from Green Day, from The Beatles (only after Across the Universe came out), from RENT and Spring Awakening and The Last Five Years. (We didn’t have Hamilton back then—I shudder to imagine what 2008 would’ve been like if we had.) From Brand New or Taking Back Sunday if you were pissed at your crush.

And then there were, sometimes concurrently with the song lyrics, the pained, cryptic, and egocentric recountings of the emotional trials of the day. Our parents wronged us. Our best friend wronged us. Our chemistry teacher wronged us. But we never actually said that outright; instead, we hinted at their sins and petty slights through suggestion and understatement. That’s right: AIM was so fertile and life-giving that we invented subtweeting to use it. (Gen X-ers: Don’t @ me about how you all proto-subtweeted on CompuServe or Usenet or ENIAC or whatever.)

But status messages were just the golden filigree of the gorgeous AIM tapestry. AIM was everything to us. I really mean that: As 9/11-jittered American parents were restricting access to the places where we could meet in public—the sociologist danah boyd writes about this in her book, It’s Complicated—we had to turn to AIM. So AIM became the original public-private space. AIM was the mall. AIM was the study carrel. AIM was our best friend’s finished basement. AIM was the side of the library where everyone smoked. AIM was the club (see, Hobbes, Calvin and) and da club (see Cent, Fifty). AIM was the original dark social.

We didn’t ask for someone’s number, at least not then—an errant month of texting in 2005 could still cost $45, an exorbitant figure to the teenage mind—so we asked for their AIM. Or we got their AIM from someone else. (We usually had to tread carefully around the ask.) And over a couple months, we assembled buddy lists of our friends and teammates and crushes and classmates. Their away lights twinkled in a constellation of teenage social possibility.

“What did you even talk about?” All the same stuff you text about now. We asked if they had copied down the math problem sets. We asked how far you were supposed to read tonight in Gatsby. (Then we didn’t do the reading.) We complained about how Mr. O’Brien was mean to freshmen. We talked about the high-school musical, about the ending of Donnie Darko, about God and religion. We used lol to stand in not only for laughter or humor, but for any inarticulable mass of any emotion at all. We talked about who had sex with who. We talked a lot about love. We felt the world shiver and transform when our crush logged on and—boodleoop—started messaging us.