There’s this weird feeling I’m having now, which isn’t terrible, but it’s lonely and odd. I’m remembering this world where I had a few good friends, and usually a romantic relationship. And my parents and my brother. And then some people from school, or work.
That was it. Oh, and the word friend didn’t have scare quotes around it.
The people from your past were gone.
If you hadn’t stayed in touch, they were just gone, and looking them up after years of ignoring each other was gonna be weird. Never was gonna happen. If you wanted to go to a high-school reunion, you went. Otherwise, never mind.
You could google stalk somebody and send them an email; you couldn’t look at pictures of their kids and look at their entire employment history.
But you did have old friends you didn’t see much anymore. Or might not see ever again. These half-life friends. These quasi friends. People who had been so important, and then, weren’t, in your day to day existence.
My parents were like that. Omnipresent, and then there, but not there, until they died a year ago. They’ve missed two yearly visits now. But they are in fact always here, boxes of ashes under my wife’s desk.
I had a lot of friends, for a time, in the 90s. We had dinner parties. Before the kids. I had a writing workshop I was very close to, with a biweekly night drinking, and a biweekly workshop.
Mistakes were made. Those relationships blew up and went away. But I had my kids. So Kids were the way we socialized. You had kid friends, kid’s parents friends, kids support group friends.
Then the kids grew up, one moved out and one is on his way. I’m a freelancer working mostly over the web. My work relationships already remote.
One thing, when you vanish from social media, and you check back, and two people checked in to see if you were dead, out of your 1000 FB friends… there’s this realization… of our essential solitude.
We don’t take up as much space in other people’s heads as we think we do. Our lives are our own.
The drone of social media fades away and you realize something is missing, in the strange quiet, and you don’t know what it is. Exactly.
Only that the silence is deafening.
I look at a picture of a girl I dated when I was in my twenties. I can see her now as a middle aged woman in a google search. I remember steaming up a car with her on a golf course in Syracuse New York. We kissed all day long. It was wonderful.
Both those two young people are as gone as the people in the boxes under my wife’s desk.
Facebook is a necklace of ghosts. For me, I think, a kind of grasping after life that isn’t really living.
If I even know what being alive is.
Time for a walk.
I still have fewer than a dozen friends. Probably fewer than half a dozen. And you’re one of them.
Glad to still have you. There is a category of ‘friends for life,’ even of people you haven’t seen for a long time, and the net, email, and now videoconferencing, does give those relationships the ability to breathe in a way that the postal mail didn’t, at least not in our memory.
There was a time, though, where relationships lived on only in that way. My father found my mother, or rather, kept her, in a series of letters, which I still have. You found Marty on IRC.
Fetishizing meatspace isn’t what I want to do.
I need to disintermediate my friendships–A thing, in no future I’d ever imagined, I’d thought I would have to say.
Speaking up out of the silence…. I don’t think people necessarily need many friends, but having a few friends, even one friend, can be very important. (It is to me.) This has been a particularly hard couple of years for keeping in touch with friends properly, but I think with the best friendships there is still something left even if both sides neglect the friendship for a time. (I hope so anyhow.)
{{Sending friendly thoughts}}
I agree. I just still feel so left behind by my parent’s deaths, and I fear the periods of long dormancy of old friendships may soon become, or could at anytime become, that eternal echoing silence. I want to live now. And some of the people I most want to be with are scattered about. Some are different people now, and so, dead to me.
I’m stuck in this melancholic reflection. I really would like for it to stop.