For several years, I lived in a different universe. My friends were two-dimensional, and I could summon them at any moment. Voices did not exist. No one cried, no one screamed, no one laughed. Emotions were reduced to a series of abbreviations. As I looked into people’s eyes, they were never looking back into mine.
Originally, I embraced Facebook as a new way to connect. Pictures that used to require printing to share were uploadable in seconds. Friends who lived thousands of miles away were suddenly sitting right in front of me on the computer screen. I felt a rush as I typed my password into the small rectangular box every day, entering a world of endless social activity. My heart jumped each time a red flag, accompanied by the satisfying ping of a new message, appeared on the corner of the page. The sounds echoed in my dreams, and my fingers itched constantly to return pokes and flip through the most recent albums. I spent my evenings wasting away in the home page’s beautifully streamlined, navy blue oblivion. Sometimes, when a friend came over, we would explore the Facebook world together, staring at the screen—but rarely looking at each other.
I felt more isolated than ever. My excitement for the website’s possibility of contact had ironically transformed me into an Internet zombie. I associated every person I saw with his or her profile picture, as though we were all frozen in time. As I spent more and more hours on Facebook, I spent less and less time interacting with friends in real life. Committing what most teenagers today would consider social suicide, I deleted my account.
“Did you fall off the face of the Earth??” my friends called to ask. They were shocked by the need to resort to such a primitive form of communication: actually talking to me. But as we talked, I realized what I had lost for so long. I had lost the fluidity of dialogue; I had lost the extended silences that weren’t awkward at all; I had lost the poignancy of speaking without being able to revise. I had lost their laughs, each one a unique sound bite that cannot be heard in “lol.” Some are quick and wispy giggles, others shrill crows from high in the throat, others boisterous guffaws that seem to shake the air around me.
I have resurrected a practice that had disappeared since middle school: walking to my friends’ houses on weekdays. The distinctive smells of their homes have come back to me, as well as the sometimes-bothersome check ups by their parents. I am now truly present in their lives. We are no longer virtual images of ourselves floating around on each other’s computer screens.
One day in class, a friend pulled a picture out of her folder and handed it to me. The two of us sat on a sidewalk with chalk in our hands, smiling without any front teeth. Nostalgia seized me; I had forgotten that a photograph was an object I could hold onto, not just something I could click. The picture now sits permanently on my dresser rather than being buried in a rarely visited Facebook album. I print photos out now, to hang up and to give to others. My memories feel less transient, more concrete.
Deleting my account has grown to be the opposite of social suicide. Sure, I’m the last to hear the latest gossip or see the newest viral video. But I hear the laughs of my long-distance friends, and I walk to the houses of those who live just down the block. I can touch the photos I treasure, not just “like” them. I feel my friends in my arms when we hug, and scream with them when we’re crumbling under stress. When I look into their eyes, they’re always looking back into mine.
I live in this universe now, and I don’t intend to go back any time soon.