Image: High Seas by Beth Hoeckel
I’ve been thinking lately about how the internet felt smaller when I was in my 20s. Yesterday a friend texted me to let me know a former twitter mutual had passed away, former because we’d had a falling out over something I don’t remember that seemed very important at the time. We were part of something, together, and then we weren’t. Losing it was as easy as clicking the mute button, and forgetting her @.
The friend who texted me might be the closest I’ve ever come to finding a soul-mate, and I found her in a twitter exchange. She slid into my DMs and invited me over for dinner. I didn’t hesitate to drive an hour to meet this stranger at her house, located in a suppressed northern suburb of Sydney with a high balcony and too much space between walls. I didn’t know her, but I knew her. She had a glass dildo sat on her piano, and a big kitchen. She was engaged, but I forgot to stop drinking and her fiancé had to passive aggressive me out of the house by staring at this new friend of mine while she and I laughed at each other. The engagement didn’t last, but our friendship did.
Around the same time, a group of us from twitter, large and incongruous, would gather for drinks at the local — yes, we had a local, although some would travel hours, or even fly in from other cities, which might sound a little desperate but felt perfectly natural given how much we’d shared together online. We knew each others’ faces and names and smells and drink orders. I made out with one of these faces at a bus stop in the rain, they’d raced out of the pub to catch me before I left, and under the crack of lightning we shared a kiss. Then I found out a mutual was secretly in love with them too, and we stopped talking for a while. We stopped DM-ing, and @-ing, and liking. I didn’t want to hurt her.
I really liked these people. I loved some of them. And they’re still there, online, connected with wires, but the spark is gone. I’m not certain what happened, but I think it was unsustainable. There were, as I said, incongruities. Big ones. I obsessed for a while over one instance when I’d been invited to a dinner party populated with the “very online” set. I brought a bottle of wine, it was the best I could afford at the time, but when someone reached for it, the host said it was a cheap one, and handed them another from their personal stash. I realised suddenly that all I knew of the people around me, including the person sat next to me who I’d just started dating, were their handles, and the personas they performed through them. In other words, I didn’t know shit about the people around me. And, getting to know them in person, well, to be frank, they seemed like jerks.
In the years since, I’ve cultivated a healthier separation between online and off, and I’ve certainly stopped my habit of dating people from twitter. But in the year of our Lord Satan, 2020, I feel some regret for letting go of that sense of online community, or maybe watching it fizzle away without doing much to stop it. Back then, an online interaction felt like a glance in a cafe, or someone shouting at me in a cafe, depending on the nature of it. Now it feels like I’m reading the diary of a stranger, someone I’ll never meet. It feels wrong somehow, like I shouldn’t be reading it, like I’m not part of their world.
It’s healthier this way, I tell myself. There’s no drama. Only politics and depression and pictures of ducks. My online friend is the mute button, and my offline friends — most of whom I made online — are now in my texts. But in the absence of real life glances, I’m lonely, and every tweet I send out feels like I’m writing on a blank page, like I’m glancing at nothing, like I’m shouting in an empty room. The internet feels bigger now, and hollow.
Dear Diary,
Oh man. Right in the feels.
That’s awesome 👍🏼