I met them once, somewhere. At a party. In another country. In an IRC channel. I met them somewhere, and we got to be friends.
Friends? OK, no. We got to be voyeurs.
Our voyeurism might be mutual, I don’t know. We are graph mates. We are visible to each other. We have what Facebook invented for us. Passive mutual visibility.
Sometimes we share pictures. Our friends upload them for us, and Facebook surfaces them diligently to our watchers, we among them. Our brains read into them deeply. We create the context we’re missing. We create it with idealism.
I don’t look long any more, or much at all. I am in a very happy relationship. I don’t need anything else. But they don’t go away, the updates of Facey B’s faraway sweethearts.
I looked at a picture today that was five years old. Five years. She’s as frozen to me as Browning’s Porphyria. I suppose I might someday see a change of relationship status to “Married”, a slew of pregnancy status updates. To me, I expect she will always look as in that shot from ‘08. An idea visited so seldom that it has no room for growth.
In no other age have we had so many people to set ourselves against, so much to compare with and so little naturally left behind.
Soon, I tell myself, I will shoo the past away. It will be hard. Printed pictures I can keep. Pixels I have to renounce permanently. It doesn't matter that I never knew them.
Soon, I will shoo the past away.
