This is a re-write of something I posted earlier at Sorabji.MOBI.
There is something haunting about discovering something of mine which I had absolutely no memory of creating. More specifically it is strange to find that I have no memory of creating this specifically for someone else.
In 2008 an Italian woman contacted me, commencing what would be an on-again-off-again correspondence that got extremely emotional at times, but always maintained its sanity and balance. This was on Facebook. Last week I reactivated Facebook after a 6-month hiatus. Before today I don’t think we had corresponded for about 2 years. We have never met and probably never will. That’s fine with me, though I admit to feeling a little miffed in 2009 or 2010, when I learned after the fact that she had visited New York to see her son but neglected to let me know she would be here. It’s a long time Internet pet peeve of mine that people will bare their souls to you via text or telephone, letting you all the way into the universe of their mind and existence, but they simply draw the line at any kind of in-person encounter. I’ve been led on in this manner for very lengthy periods of time (years, even). I’ve reached a point in life where I think I’ve just gotten used to it as a predictable familiarity of online life.
I do not know a lot about this woman except that she is beautiful, married, and about 10 or 12 years older than me. I think her less than stellar English actually serves as a benefit to our correspondence, since she seems always to find a way of saying exactly the right thing in a way that fluent English might not convey with the same ruggedness of expression.
Our conversations now are like annual or semi-annual checking-in sessions, reminding me in a way of the film “Same Time Next Year”. That movie was one of a few films from my youth that played a defining role in my concept of romance and, more importantly, companionship.
I told her today that if I have learned anything about myself in the last year or so it is that I am a little boy inside, and I always will be. I am and always will be vulnerable to abuse and to living in fear.
Her response should not have surprised me, considering her demonstrated ability to see right through this person. She said she knew that about me almost from the moment we commenced correspondence, that I possessed a “childlike innocence” which she found “sweet”. It is the best mindset for creativity, she said, adding that she also knew from the get-go that I was a vulnerable soul.
As for herself she says now that she falls in love several times a day, sometimes for 5 minutes other times for 5 years. I think I could have told her that without her ever articulating it.
She asked today if I had a copy of a video I had sent her in 2008. The video was of me playing a piano piece I had written for her. I had absolutely zero memory of creating this video but after some digging around I uncovered a video for a short piano piece I wrote and dedicated to her 8 years ago. It is unfamiliar to me but it certainly sounds like something I would have written, and those are obviously my hands playing it.
The video turned up, of all places, in my Gmail outbox. It would have never occurred to me on my own to look for it there but part of her detective work helped guide me there. Content of my Gmail outbox there shows that I have not sent anyone an email from there in 6 or 7 years. I still don’t understand why the video is not on my computer but whatever, she has it now and says she’s very happy on account of it. She said that she listened to it and watched it regularly but that somehow it was among a bunch of files that got deleted during a recent computer meltdown.
It was an inspirational bit of correspondence for me, one which helped lift me out of an extraordinarily strong bout of depression and claustrophobia yesterday.
I told her I’d be leaving Facebook again soon, after reconnecting with a few people (herself among them) and after straightening out my fan page admin situation, which I seem to have accomplished already.
Announcing your planned departure from Facebook feels something like announcing your own death. You just do not exist to some people outside of that ecosystem. As much of a brainsucking wasteland as Facebook looks to me now I nevertheless step away from it with trepidation that I will miss important news. I know a number of people who heard nothing about the death of our mutual friend until after the funeral. This is because they were not on Facebook, which was apparently the only place where the news got around.
Now that I think of it I just remembered mentioning this video and correspondence to a friend around the time it happened. He was taken aback that I made meaningful contact like this with strangers through Facebook, or anywhere on the Internet. Somehow that sort of thing has eluded him in life.
