Hi, I'm Ross and I'm here to critique your piece as part of #FeedbackFrenzy's Frenzy #2. As always, critique represents my opinion, which you're free to heed or ignore as you want. A note about stars: I'm pretty stingy with them, but not out of a desire to be cruel--to me, a solid, good, story without any significant flaws is a 3. First off, thanks for including some direction for critiquers. I'll address those points in my critique.

After some opening statements, I'll discuss the piece in a linear fashion, start-to-finish. Then I'll hit your four questions and wrap it up.

Opening

Broadly, this is an effective piece of flashfiction. Very little is extraneous and there's very little that's lacking in detail. You avoided cliche language and mostly stayed away from the abstractions commonly found in such personal, emotional pieces. That's extremely commendable. Well done.

Because of the obvious skill of the piece, my critique will largely consist of little, nitty-gritty issues. That's not because I want to tear it utterly apart, it's because I don't have to spend the critique dealing with classic systemic issues like "show, don't tell" or "avoid abstract language" or "grammar is a thing you might want to study".

Start to Finish

First off, I like the title. It's a little sparse as an introduction to the piece (which is itself pretty sparse), but it introduces an intense double meaning after you've read the entire piece. All of my favorite titles are of that type--they help prepare you for the story to come and they mean something different at the end.

The opening line is solid. It might be better with a more active verb than "means", like "carries", but it gets the job done. Combined with the title, it prepares the reader for the terse language of the piece.

The second paragraph is probably the weakest in the whole piece, and since it is the first chunk of detail the reader gets, that's a weakness that needs addressing. The opening sentence is wordy--"comfortably" can be omitted without a serious loss of meaning, "current" is implied (since if you were using ancient or future technology that would have to be spelled out), and "the distance it allows us while keeping us close" is clunky (a possible rewrite could combine those two thoughts into 'the illusion of closeness' or a single phrase like that). In the second sentence, the list ordering is a bit odd, since the 1st and 3rd items are focused on the person receiving the text and the 2nd on the person writing the text. Rather than a list, I might pare it down to just one of each (to me, "process" is the best candidate for cutting). In the next line, "too personal" is probably extraneous--"too open" is better and the next line develops "open" better than "personal". Speaking of which, "lines of communication wrenched that wide" is an excellent and visceral metaphor--so good that the cliche banality of the "old demons" is especially underwhelming. A fresher image than demons would really do well here--other unpleasant things do well out of the ground, after all.

The third paragraph comes galloping out of the gate with a combination "oh crap" and "aha" moment. Nice work. The clipped, analytic tone of these sentences reminds me of the compartmentalization any severe grief engenders--I had immediate flashbacks to painful events from my own past. Really, truly, well done. One ambiguity in this piece that I wrestled with is introduced here--when the girlfriend became an ex, and how the narrator remained friends despite that. While those details aren't strictly necessary for understanding the emotion of the piece, they do leave I think just a smidgeon too little information about the characters and their relationship to each other. "in chaos" would probably be better with a less abstract word ("grief" springs to mind), but it earns its place much more thoroughly than your average use on a dA lit piece. "meltdowns" is a poor companion to the true life necessities of "sleep" and "food"--something needs to be there for some classic Rule of Three symmetry, but "breathing" might be better. If you need to include "meltdowns" that might be better off in a different line ("Meltdowns are things that other people have time to have.").

The fourth paragraph picks up abruptly from where the second lets off. In a longer piece, the constant shifts and terse language would get exhausting (or at least disengaging) eventually, but this isn't long enough for that to be a problem. It's a strength of this work. I'm not convinced that the tense shift to present introduced here is a strong enough choice to justify the weirdness of the read. The second and third sentences here are both a little heavy on the prepositional phrases--I'd cut out extraneous information from the first and make the second two sentences (or one with a semicolon). The phrase "social networking" at the end of this paragraph was a bit jarring (and this time, not in a good way). The phrase is almost cheerful, an smiley-face on the end of a dark paragraph. "the internet" is a solid replacement, as would a phrase with "filter" as a verb or a noun somewhere.

The fifth paragraph opens with another dry knife-twister. In the third sentence, "we take" would probably flow better as "taking". "We don't mention" is a winner of a phrase.

The sixth paragraph's value judgment from the future (about call frequency) is excellent.

The seventh paragraph contains some of that ambiguity I mentioned earlier. 'Whose dog' is a big question (the obvious answer is the ex, but wouldn't her phone call say something like "Buster is dead" or "My god is dead"?). I don't mind having to stop and ponder in the middle of a story. That's usually a good sign. While I can't put my finder on exactly the detail I think is missing, there's a detail-shaped hole in the piece that I sense can neatly erase those ambiguities and keep the emotional intensity high.

The closing line is, like the start, solid. I am curious as to why they are so different, though. It would be more conventional as a framing device for them to be identical or nearly so. While doing something because it's conventional is a poor reason, I don't see a big difference in the way to the two wordings work within the piece, so I don't see why there's a difference in the first place.

Your Questions

1 - I am left with a feeling of bleakness, an emotional deadening that comes with too much pain too quickly. That the events are somewhat removed in time gives the narrator a better sense of perspective, and less hopelessness, but the impression is still numb (just not with shock anymore).

2 - I think the tone works perfectly. In a longer piece, as I mentioned, it would probably be too much. Here that's less of an issue.

3 - Least favorite is easily the "demons" cliche. Most favorite is the line that starts "It's elusive...".

4 - My suggestions on improvements are contained in the commends above. Tightening the language a bit, hinting a bit further at background relationships to remove some ambiguity, and keeping the language concrete throughout will all improve the piece.

Summary

This is a solid piece of prose. I think you do an excellent job manipulating the reader's emotional state, and you do that by keeping things concrete, relateable, and terse. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with any improvements you make.