The Internet Writes My Autobiography In Indelible Ink
Morning began with a text from someone I thought I had blocked.
“Did you just dial me by mistake?”
Eyes still sleep-logged, I thumbed through the unfamiliar basic phone I’m using in lieu of my flash smartphone (lying at the workshop for repair). Damn. He was right. I don’t remember if I had deleted him from my Contacts. Then I realise the phone had synced up his contacts from my mailbox. Stupid efficient Google. Won’t let me forget. This wouldn’t have happened on my regular phone. Bloody smartphone. Letting me down with withdrawal symptoms so bad.
I turned to my blog for comfort (it is my best friend, after all). The random post that came up was a chronicle of the Vasai wedding. Happy memories all of them. And in the post, in all the stories that lead from it, Rehab still lives. She has just not checked her Twitter account in a long time. A really long time. A common friend I met recently said,
“Rehab’s twitter account will follow ours forever.”
She’ll never get mad at me for something stupid I said or be a part of the dramatic insta-love/insta-hate games that dot the social media landscape. She’s in my universe forever. Oh My God. And just as I typed this and tabbed back to Twitter to check something, this tweet
came up.
Last week I argued with someone who complained about the frivolity of the relationships of the Facebook generation. I showed him this article (‘All my exes live in texts‘). How, I asked him, can you call this frivolous, when our emotions, our associations taint us forever? I’m MTV generation, not Facebook generation. But I guess it’s all the same digitally enhanced fake lifestyle to the ‘If-I-can’t-touch-it-it’s-not-real’ people.
A good friend who knows me perhaps a little too well, sent me this (‘The stages of missing someone you barely know‘). It’s what your style used to be, he wrote. I wanted to hate him a little for it. And the writer. I didn’t say a word but my life, my entire month of May was mapped out in that article written by a stranger.
It reminded me of people I don’t want to block but I don’t want to see the Pages they like, the places they went to and the people they friended either. Because it means they had time to do all of that but not time to meet me.
You can make some things go away by acting like they’re over already and then, like they never happened. So misery does not love company. Angst becomes real when it has an audience. Even vicariously, by its very relatability, a piece such as this, becomes your story. And you realise the telling of it has pried loose stuff caked to the floor of the dark corners of your mind and put them into a feature film. The unmanageable past is back to torment you out of the optimised bits & bytes that make up your life.
The internet writes my life in indelible ink. And in other people’s stories.
