Somebody that I used to know

Somebody that I used to know

Somebody that I used to know.

It’s funny to me that the concept still centers the heart of every other song on the radio. That people are still singing and writing their hearts out about people they used to know.

Because they don’t really exist anymore.

This is the awkwardness of hellos and goodbyes today. I think we have the paradoxes down all wrong. It’s not how many people you can connect to without leaving your bed or changing your dirty pajamas. It’s not about how the person of your profile is so much more [insert adjective] than your ‘real’ self.

This may all be true, but it’s not the point. At least to me, anyway.

The painful paradox of being human and growing up and changing in the age of the Internet is that the more you live, the more your heart splits open. Before, when you lost touch with someone because you moved or you changed or they changed or because things fell apart as they tend to do in this entropic universe, you’d wonder how they were doing, here and then, curiosity or regret or fondness like the gentle patter of a light rain as it falls on the front window of your car. You drive forward, and the patter slips away.

Now, even though you move forward like every person did in the past, you are not just living one continuous line of existence. You occupy as many threads as your curiosity demands. In the past, the curiosity for the others who have come and gone in our lives still existed. But, short of a willful letter or a high school reunion, it remained just that.

Curiosity, coming and going, but always receding nebulously because you only led one life.

Now, our lives split infinitely like cells, like hair fraying, like zippers. Like seams coming undone. You can know that your favorite babysitter from middle school is engaged to an Egyptian investment banker in London even though you have not seen her in seven years, or heard from her in three. You can know that the first person you fell in love with in high school still likes girls who go to elite law schools even though you haven’t seen him in five years. You can know a dear old friend from junior high who you’ve grown apart with increasingly confuses social justice with poor manners.

You can know all of this, these personal facts, but not know them. You evolve in one way, a part from all these people, but yet you are still privy to evolving data that is completely disconnected from the reality of your life.

And there lies the déjà vu. From not knowing someone anymore, but knowing them all the same. That if you were to run into them on the street one day, you would have to feign ignorance to how their lives have been, because your lives veered away from each other, but your data sets didn’t.

Because although your lives did evolve away from each other, they also didn’t. You were still there, peripherally connecting the dots on past friends and acquaintances and lovers, seeing the old them permutate into new formations in the present, deducing what had changed.

This sounds voyeuristic and creepy, like your stalking someone. But you’re not. To know all of this you just need to click on the homepage of your facebook account, and the stream of everyone you used to know floods into your life.

The real struggle of the Internet age is that there are no longer somebody’s we used to know. We know everyone, even when we don’t, even when we’ve changed. There are only the somebody’s we used to know in formality, which makes all we still know about the people who will always be important because of what once was painful.

You could have been that girl who did [insert verb]. In some reality, maybe you did. But in this one, you didn’t. Who knows why? It doesn’t matter. That you didn’t means the possibility that you did exists alongside whatever choice you made.

And yet you must live with the information from all the other lives you might have led.

This is not to say you even regret your choices. Just that I don’t think we were built to know so much. To live in a world without opportunity costs when it comes to the data of love and life and friendship.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer the old fashioned way of missing someone. That kind of missing that comes from one of the many people you once were that exist as layers of an onion peeled inversely into existence. The twelve year old girl who worshipped every move and word of you babysitter who read you gossip magazines and fed you candy and Chinese take-out and took you to get your nails done. The fourteen year old girl whose breathe was taken away by that boy’s puns and his smell of laundry soap.

I prefer to wonder how those people are, to send them love and light, and let them go. Just as they have let me go.

But if you want to fake a semblance of being a part of this day and age, that’s not possible.

I’m writing to you from Jogjakarta, Indonesia where I’m spending my days writing my novel instead of writing my research paper. The people I love most in this world are on the other side of it. Facebook is the only way I can tell them “Good morning,” or “Sweet dreams,” or hear about their (mis)adventures. I don’t have illusions about the costs of keeping in touch. Knowing all these things, seeing their pictures, their faces, what they’re reading, it doesn’t make being here easier. It doesn’t make me happier.

But I guess I’d rather be a little less content but know how my people are doing, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling.

I hope this is going to be the last extreme detachment of mine from the homeland. Nothing is as extreme as the technology measures taken to keep up with your sister who is living twelve hours behind you and already has a whack schedule. But even when I return, even if I’m living in one state only three hours behind the state of [insert person I love A LOT A LOT A LOT], this is it. This is our now, where you have to juggle a million tracks even when your feet are only walking one.

You will not be invited to the wedding, but the heart of the twelve-year old girl inside you is still waiting to be asked to be a bridesmaid, to see the dress you dreamed up together after watching Sweet Home Alabama for the [insert absurd number]th time.

Because when you see the face of that somebody you used to know, when you see that smile that once meant the whole world and then some, even if it’s only communicated to you now through computer code and pixels, you could swear you still did.