Outside, the sun beats down, warming and illuminating everything. Probably. It might be raining now for all you know. If not, then children will be out in the streets by this time, cycling, or playing football, or walking, or even just sitting around, talking about nothing. Even if it is raining, they’ll be inside, together, talking and laughing and playing videogames and complaining they’re bored. Perhaps you miss those uncomplicated days, before you had your own computer and the internet. When you were still at school, and not university. Before you had all the time in the world to kill and everyone else had jobs. You open up the internet browser and click through the familiar pages. It’s the summer holiday.

You check Myspace first, then Facebook: Bulletins, no comments, no notifications. You go back to Myspace. It seems extravagant to open up both at once. You read the bulletins. A quiz. It’s always a quiz. “Have you kissed anyone on your top friends?” “Yes,” you think. “What’s your relationship status?” “Single, now,” you think. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” “Probably,” you think. You get bored halfway down, knowing most of the questions before they’re asked, and close the window. You open a new one and play an online game. This kills some time, gives you a small sense of achievement. The game finished, you browse the site, looking for further entertainment. A banner flashes up. “XXX teens.” It says. There is a low-res picture next to the text: a coquettish blue-eyed girl staring out at you. Momentarily your cursor drifts towards the banner but then, no, it’s too early for porn. You go back to Myspace.

Blue floods the screen. Why blue? Facebook is blue as well. Why always blue? Blue like the sky. Blue like an ocean. It is an ocean; an ocean of people all adrift in wide blue waters, throwing out lines to each other, little invisible threads that tie them together. Life is like that, you think, the world is like that. All these people, they are just floating, drifting, in this vast murky space, bumping into each other completely at random, holding on to each other sometimes, sometimes losing grip, watching the people they held onto sail away over the horizon.

Some people say the world is smaller now, because of the telephone, because of email, because of the internet and a million other technologies. Perhaps that’s true. The ocean isn’t any smaller though. It’s a wide as it ever was. Perhaps though, perhaps it’s easier to cross now, to find those people worth holding onto. Every last one of them, or most of them at least, are now only a few clicks away, if you know where to click, what to type. You click browse. There must be someone out there worth talking to.

There was a time you did this every week; browse endlessly through the pages and pages of people until you found one to talk to. You were looking for a girlfriend back then. You found one too. You met your second girlfriend on Myspace. And your third. Your first one, she was just a fluke, a freak of nature. She was someone you bumped into randomly in the ocean, the currents having brought you together. Since then you’d needed to take control, to trawl the ocean for yourself, steering people towards you like a lighthouse. It was a long time now since you’d done that: You hadn’t needed to. Until recently you’d had someone. Now, for now, you had yourself and you had the porn and the television and the videogames the internet had to offer. Still, old habits die hard and you had time to kill. It was the summer holiday. You had clicked browse.

Browse Nottingham. Why? You always had. You spent more time in Sheffield now though, at university. Browse Sheffield. Browse 18-21. A list comes up. It’s already set at default to browse females. You shrug. Is it because there’s hundreds of other guys who look for girls on Myspace that this is the default? You scroll idly down the list. You think about what else you could be doing. Perhaps you could write a poem, or a blog, if you had anything to write about. Then at the bottom you see her. Something about her eyes and her hair, the way she looks at the camera, makes you have to click the link. You’re not sure why, there’s just something so coquettish in her expression, so much more coquettish than the low-res picture of the girl on the banner, if only for not trying to be.

Her profile loads up. You scan through it. There’s some pictures on the main page of a band your ex used to like, and something similar in the profile layout. Why does that always happen? How do you always manage to seek out the same kind of a girl from all the girls on the internet, in the ocean, from a single thumbnail picture? Are you fated, you wonder, to go out with incarnations of the same girl, over and over again, forever seeking to replace that which you lost the first time?

You click, since you’re here, again for the first time, on her pictures. You smile. She’s not the same. Or she’s different enough. Everyone’s different. You know this. Every last person in the vast ocean of life is different. This girl’s no exception (the musical interest was just a freak chance), and her pictures have opened up a whole new life you never knew existed before you clicked on them. Somehow it amazes you, every time you see pictures of a stranger on Myspace or Facebook, or even pictures of someone you half know, that they have this whole life you’ve never considered before, never been a part of. Suddenly, you want to be a part of it. Want to barge into that life, her life, as a friend, as anything, and experience some of it, learn the names of the people in the photographs. You feel, somehow, as if a connection has been made, as if you’d exchanged glances across a room. So what if you hadn’t met? You could still add her, let her get to know you.

Let her get to know you. Who are you? More importantly, how do you present yourself to her? You think it was Freud who said that there are four people when you go on a date: who you are, who the other person thinks you are, who you think the other person is and who the other person is. If that’s true then there’s six people when you meet someone on Myspace: the four people Freud describes and the two people your profiles say you each are. In a way, you think, your profile is a kind of mask; an edited version of yourself in which you get to take out all the bad bits and leave only the best to shine. Perhaps this is why so many people are attracted to Myspace, to Facebook, because, not only do you have complete creative control over how you present yourself, you get to write your own reviews as well.

You click ‘add’. Everything will be better if she appears on your friends list. She’s the sort of girl, you know this already, who could give you hope, who could sweep away all the porn, all the boredom and the inadequacy with a single act of friendship, with a single click. Accept. You hope she accepts you. You want to be accepted. You feel that you need her in your life so that you can be, even in the smallest way, a part of hers. Otherwise that entire life she lead, told through the pictures, through the mask of words on her profile, would be lost. Even the very idea of her would be lost in the ether, the ocean. Why do you care so much, you wonder. Perhaps you’re even a little bit in love with her, because profiles, even edited, even with the bad bits taken out, say a lot about a person.

A few hours later you check your pending friend requests. It’s still there, in a limbo state neither accepted nor declined. You’ve already promised yourself you won’t check her profile again. For one thing it’s creepy, almost degrading, to look again and again, to spy upon a stranger, even if it is only their mask. And for another thing you don’t want to get any more emotionally involved with her, just in case she declines, and is lost. You refresh the page. There is no change. You half wish she would hurry up, end your waiting, but then you half wish she won’t, because in waiting there’s hope, but if she declines the hope dies.

A night passes. You found something to distract yourself with, to push away the thoughts of this girl you loved but did not know. It took will power to not return, even fleetingly, to check Myspace, but you did it. Now you feel you can allow yourself to check. Almost feverishly you load up the page, your heart beating hard as if you were on your way to a first date. You almost don’t want to look, but you have to. You force yourself to. You open up the pending friend requests. The folder is empty. She’s decided. You scroll down. You must have one more friend than yesterday. You must. You don’t. Perhaps someone else deleted you. You click the ‘new friends’ link. “There are no new friends to display.”

Your heart falls in dismay. A little part of you dies inside. Why do you care so much? Why do you feel this great sadness suddenly weigh you down; you haven’t lost anything. But then, you haven’t gained anything. And, in a way, you think, explaining this dismay to yourself, you have lost something: you lost a chance, you lost a future that could have held anything, if only she’d accepted you and you’d talked to her. And now you feel like shit. You don’t even feel like writing a poem, or a blog, or even checking Facebook. Slowly, dismally, you type into Google “XXX teens”. You won’t enjoy it, it isn’t preferable, but it will pass the time, and you have another day to kill while outside children cycle by, and kick footballs and sit around and talk.

Tags: Facebook, Fiction, Internet, Myspace, original fiction, Relationships, Second-person Narrative, Social Networking

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.