While I would love for the gang to show up and help me with painting, and would invite you to come eat Slim Jims and drink decaf coffee in my yard, all of my best friends are imaginary friends. Internet friends are even more magical than imaginary friends because they are imaginary friends who are real.
You Medium writers like to try to shape reality with your narratives. I like to do that too. I was entranced by Facebook until I realized that the people from childhood whom I had mythologized were still living and breathing. They hadn’t submitted to the narrative trajectory I had for them. Some of the villains had grown up and become prosperous rather donning rags and dying in prison. Imagine Oliver Twist logging onto Facebook only to find out that Fagin has a nice house on Long Island Sound and enjoys reading bedtime stories to his grandchildren.
I’m not that fond of reality. At my age reality mixes easily with dreams and the analgesic of fiction. There are many times I think about my childhood and can’t tell if what is in my head is a memory or merely a tableaux I created. I have a better memory than most of my friends and family. They often acquiesce to my shape of the past. Some older brothers and cousins will answer questions put to them. “Were the currants black or red?” In my mind they were black, sometimes swollen. I ask, but their answers do not matter.
My mother is dead. I have enough peasant in me that I can see her in the sparks of a fire. She shows up in my dreams. Sometimes I create cartoons of her in my Medium posts. She survived the ’38 Hurricane by sailing across Little Narragansett bay on a bathroom floor. That event was well documented, and, consequently, she lives on the Internet in several incarnations, as maid, maiden, and crone, but I always recognize her as my mother.
Why didn’t I just do like Bob Dylan or Jim Morrison and become who I wanted to be? Why was so much of my life constrained by existential fear? Why was identity such a Herculean task?
It doesn’t matter. The Internet flood came at midlife and washed away the rigors of the real. We got baptized in the ether. We can remake ourselves, and move through our dreams and fairy houses right here. In real life.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to Emily Dickinson if she had the Internet. What of George Eliot? That’s an interesting thought, but more interesting to me is that Emily Dickinson may be here on Medium now. Writing from her bedroom. She may even recommend or comment on one of my posts.
In fact, I think she has.