Originally written in 2018, I have been referencing this little essay I wrote a lot recently as we build our connections online. There are some things that have come to light since I wrote this essay, but it does not change the way I felt at the time, so I have chosen to leave it as is.
Someone I knew died this summer. Someone I didn’t know died this summer. I could say either phrase for the same person. Both are accurate because someone I knew and didn’t really know died and I am grieving. My grief seems false, however, like I have no right to feel it. I never met him and he didn’t even know my name. The only person I met was only his online persona—his public posts on Twitter, responses to my comments, his dating profile, his videos and photos, and whatever else I found in his electronic footprint—essentially, the same traces we all leave scattered about the internet revealing the professional and personal, but rarely the intimate.
I didn’t pursue him. I didn’t know he existed until he followed me on Twitter, undoubtedly attracted by my pseudonym, which I borrowed from Shakespeare’s Rosalind in As You Like It. A college professor under perpetual contracts, I had set up the account to protect my professional self while I voiced my opinions on teaching, the administration of post-secondary education, and precarious work. His shared experience in these, as an adjunct professor (Shakespeare specifically) moving between universities, and never being completely sure of next semester’s employment was the online intersection where he first saw me. None of my other followers had even recognized the literary reference despite the Robert Walker Macbeth painting of Rosalind as my Twitter profile photo, but as a scholar of Shakespeare I knew that my new follower understood.
I followed him back, and with curiosity. More than that, I creeped him, delving into his publicly available information to discover someone that I generally liked with a few things in common: we both taught (with passion it would seem), we both had a fascination with words, literature and history, radio and podcasts. And soon we would both be living in the same small city. I learned about his professional life, watched his YouTube videos, followed his quest to buy a house in an aggressive seller’s market, responded to his Tweets, and directed general comments to him that fit his interests. I had a million questions and a million things to say on all those subjects. I looked forward to his move because I knew that eventually we would cross paths and I would meet him.
I’m not naïve. I never fooled myself into thinking that we had a friendship. I have been on enough Tinder dates to know that it is too easy to create a complete person where a text conversation leaves holes, to imagine a relationship where there is none, to impose false expectations on others. And I have been pursued relentlessly enough to realize that knowing more about someone than they know about you is alarming; my identity was still hidden while his was on display. And while I willingly indulge my fantasies of meeting people, I would never dream of acting on them. So, when he moved to my city I didn’t invite him for coffee. I would allow chance to throw us together and reveal myself more carefully so as not to come off as invasive and creepy.
I didn’t say anything. Not even a “hello” when I saw him at a small viewing of Richard V. His laughter highlighting the jokes that the mostly family and friends audience didn’t get, and his audible reactions punctuating passages that I had forgotten since university. I just caught his eye and smiled taking joy in his enjoyment. I only remembered that leeks were involved, and by that point in the play was overcome with a fit of giggles as the actors beat each other with the most massive leeks I had ever seen. Pieces of the vegetable flew out amongst the audience, my companion and I in the front row were almost hit, and the entire room smelled like leeks. I would remind him I was there and laugh again, when we did eventually meet.
My reluctance to reach out was driven as much by my experience meeting people from the internet as by my certainty that an opportunity would come up again. I have repeatedly felt the rejection of men where I have either been not good enough, skinny enough, pretty enough, or too opinionated, too weird, or too scary (“disarming” one lover labelled me before ghosting me). And every encounter weighty with the false idea that, as a single woman, I must have expectations of permanence and devotion from the person I meet—that I am needy, as if loneliness is leprosy, contagious with touch. With the weight ascribed to these online connections, it is impossible to form relationships of any degree. People fear revealing the level of intimacy required to truly connect as human beings and I am not about to make that first step, preferring to hide behind my wit and words of my online self.Besides, he was intriguing, intelligent, good looking, while I perceive myself as plain, with a moderate education. And surely his newfound friends and colleagues would be much more interesting than I was.
His Twitter was quiet during the summer. Not that he Tweeted incessantly, but I had come to expect something every few days to pique my curiosity. Periodically, I checked his feed just in case I missed something, but figured he was busy with his new home, new job, and new friends. Still, I was aching for some contact and invented my excuse to reach out. In July, I Tweeted: “@schole_master Potential love interest declared he doesn’t like #Shakespeare. Should I persuade him to like the bard or is the relationship doomed from the start?” It probably took me 20 minutes to write the Tweet to make it both clear, non-committal, and marginally clever. “@Rosalind_Arden I am the last person in the world to ask for love or Shakespeare advice, but for what it is worth, I do think that it bodes ill, like strong opinions about pineapple on pizza, though not as bad as supporting Trump.” His response simply confirmed what I already knew, but I hadn’t Tweeted him for his advice—just to get his attention. I was surprised though that he wouldn’t consider himself capable of commenting on Shakespeare, perhaps love because we always feel like we are failing at that, but I failed to see the vulnerability in the self-deprecating Tweet.
By August his Twitter went quiet. When he wrote his last Tweet, I missed it. I was camping in the forest, a world, completely removed from self-imposed demands of my wired life. That evening he wrote: “Crito, we a cock to Asclepius. Please, don’t forget to pay the debt.” In retrospect, posting the last words of Socrates was a clear indication of the end of his life. But would I have perceived the gravity of his state if I had seen the Tweet at the time? Would I have interpreted the obscurity of this post accurately? And would my response (if I had written one) have influenced the outcome? By the time I had emerged from the woods and reconnected with the online world, the next Tweet was already there from a family member announcing his sudden and tragic death.
This wasn’t the first time an online connection died before I got to meet him. Several years before I had been corresponding with an interesting character through a dating site. Only_On_Thursdays was unique, bright, and definitely a bit of a weirdo—exactly my type. I enjoyed our banter that leaned towards witty and obscure rather than the typical, “Hey! How R U?”, “Hi, beautiful!” or “So, how big are your boobs?” But he ghosted me, which isn’t at all unusual in online dating. Only a few weeks later when I saw his obituary did I realize that he hadn’t found another girl to talk to or gotten back together with an ex, as I might have imagined. Rather, his heart had failed due to a congenital defect. And when I finally found the process of online dating too ridiculous and it came time to delete my profile, I was reluctant to lose these conversations we had had online, because he was still there, gradually moving down the list of potential matches.
How many other potential friends or lovers have died before I got the chance to meet them? How many lost opportunities to connect? Thinking that I may have just missed them is preferable to the thought that my single state is my own doing, that the fact that I obscure myself behind pseudonyms and clever phrases has nothing to do with it, or that I am incapable of making the leap from the superficial online to the depth of real life. The internet now seems rife with missed connections, tenuous and lonely. I wonder, if I had reached out sooner, could I have changed a life?
Logically, I know his death had nothing to do with me. But the heart acts independent of logic and fills in meaning where there is none. I am surprised at the magnitude of the grief that hits me—and the subsequent guilt for feeling it. My grief seems illegitimate. I didn’t know him, and the sadness I feel must be insignificantly small compared to that of his real family and friends. My grief is based not on memory, but on fantasy—the stuff of dreams—regret, and missed opportunity.
In the days following his death, I repeatedly scanned through his Twitter and other online materials as if I could glean more information about the person he was and the meaning of his death from the fragments of his online presence. Condolences flood in response to the post announcing his death. A few more posts appear from the family detailing memorial services, linking to a gofundme scholarship fund. Then the Twitter feed slows to a stop, his life, as it has only ever been for me, frozen in the electronic pulses of the internet—pixels of light for ideas, words, thoughts, 280 characters or less coming from the cold, blue-white light of a computer screen. And when I close my laptop, he disappears.
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