Searching For A Long-Lost Friend’s Internet Footprints
***All names have been changed.***
An old high school friend might be a missing person… by modern American standards at least.
Jay was highly intelligent and a talented writer with the difficult personality to match. He’d just turned 16 when I met him; we attended a Catholic high school with mostly middle and upper middle-class white kids in suburban Connecticut at the end of the Reagan ’80s. Neither of us fit in well (or wanted to). I noticed him in the cafeteria early in my freshman year, where he somehow managed to be wearing a punked up denim jacket despite our dress code, and was verbally abusing someone with a lot of $10 words. I made a mental note to get to know him.
He was a year ahead of me, but we had a couple mutual friends and eventually ended up at the same cafeteria table. I grabbed his soda out of his hand and started drinking it, a literal grab for attention that worked. We had a tumultuous three-month romance and a friendship that lasted more than a decade. Jay lived by the beach in the shore town where I grew up, an environment with relaxed parental supervision and pretty easy access to alcohol and drugs. We’d walk down to the beach or meet at the library and talk about ideas and writing.
Jay disappeared for the first time during his junior year. Eventually, we heard he was in “rehab,” actually a now-notorious program for adolescents called Straight. He came back to school after more than a year away and finished his senior year with my class, straight as an arrow and full of recovery industry platitudes. We spent some time together before graduation, but only kept in touch sporadically over the next couple years. Jay went to college and spent a semester in Europe, and I went to cosmetology school, got a serious boyfriend and worked.
In 1993, I decided to take some classes at a local state university. One day at the beginning of the semester, as I walked across campus, I heard someone yell “Franco!” I looked around, and there was Jay, sitting on the edge of a big planter in a purple paisley shirt, cigarette in hand. We hung out on a regular basis for the next five years. It was apparent pretty quickly that the recovery platitudes were gone and alcohol and weed were back. Once in a while we would drink a bottle of Riesling and end up kissing, but we were friends during those years, nothing less, nothing more.
Jay’s emotions could be unpredictable. One night he picked me up to go to a show, and on the way there, I said or did something that enraged him so much he refused to go to the show with me. He dropped me off at his apartment, told his roommate to take me home and took off. I could tell he was really upset, not just being manipulative, but I didn’t understand what I had done or how to fix it. If you were going to be friends with him, you had to accept things like that were going to happen sometimes.
It took a while, but Jay finished school, handed in an honors thesis, volunteered with an NGO during the Bosnian War and did some work at the U.N. He seemed full of promise and turmoil. He said he wanted to write for The Economist someday. It didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility.
Then, at the end of the ’90s, Jay seemed to vanish into thin air. I didn’t realize for a while that he wasn’t around anymore since it was routine for me to not hear from him for a couple months, but a couple months became a couple years, and a couple years became a decade. Over the past seven years, most of the people we went to school with joined Facebook, and eventually all of our old friends were on Facebook except Jay. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this, and it became an occasional topic of discussion. Google searches turned up next to nothing. I found a profile for someone in his family on Facebook, but he wasn’t in their friends list. A friend found an email address for another relative a while ago and got a brief response, “Jay is well. I’ll pass along your contact information to him.” That was all we ever heard.
We’ve speculated over the years about where he is and why (how) he has almost no Internet presence in 2015 even though he was an early user back in the ’90s. One friend thinks he might have a career in espionage. Again, it doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility.
Jay’s “disappearance” has made me think about what having no Internet presence (at least not under your real name) means. Is it a desire to disappear from your old life and into a new one? Is he hiding something? (And if so, why do I feel a need to find out?) Has the ability to look almost anyone up on Google or Facebook and find out what they’re up to, sometimes in excruciating detail, made it harder to let go of the people in your past?
I’ll admit to not being very good at letting people go. I’m still close to my childhood friends, and I know what most of my exes are up to, even if I don’t keep in touch with them regularly. That I search for Jay periodically is as symbolic as his absence. I’ve thought about what I’d do if I found him online, and I’ve decided I’d leave him alone. It seems obvious that he doesn’t want to be found, and in a way, searching for him feels like a violation of his privacy. We’ve all had the experience of being found online by someone we didn’t really want to find us. I wonder if Jay experiences a bigger version of the dread you feel when you see that friend request from the person you never wanted to hear from again.
Sometimes I think I’m better off with my memories anyway. I’ve seen updated versions of most of the people from my past now, and sometimes I prefer my memories of them. There’s the kid I remember as cool who spams my Facebook news feed with racist memes, or the girl who was so much fun to hang with who now mommy-blogs her concerns about what “the kids” are wearing and listening to today, and honestly, I’d rather just have my memories of them the way they were.
But Jay doesn’t change. In my mind, he’s still 28 years old, full of promise and turmoil, his entire future a blank slate.
***
I did a last search for Jay while writing this. You never know. As usual, I didn’t find him, but I stumbled across a blog kept by his father, also a writer. The last post, written shortly before he died of cancer last spring, was a wish that Jay would contact him, after years out of touch.
