seems like it, though.
Having a particularly emotional Saturday, and I wish I could understand why. In one aspect, I know it’s always the same issue. But today I can’t really pin it on one thing in particular—I haven’t experienced anything that triggered me. Nothing like that. It’s not even a rainy day, one of my favorite excuses. I guess I’ve just had time to myself, time to think, and maybe that’s the biggest killer of all.
We are past the midpoint of May. My last missive on this blog was in early January, so it has been a while. Sometimes I have thought about writing here—I’ve had ideas. And I’ve thought repeatedly of the premise, that I wanted to be able to post anything just to prove to the world in some small way that, in fact, I am still alive, or at least, not dead. This afternoon, something gave me pause, brought me back to the premise, and I felt compelled to write right here, right now. I’m not dead, FYI. Even if it sometimes seems like it, though. So, what finally got me to write?
Blame it on Youtube, seriously. It’s such a stupid chain of events, when I really think about it, to the point where I’m not sure if I want to keep writing, but whatever. I wanted to see the highlights of a sporting event that had occurred today, but of course when I got to Youtube’s front page, their wonderful algorithm decided to not surface such a video anywhere, despite following the official channel for the league in question.
So I begrudgingly clicked the hamburger icon on the side of the screen, and I scrolled to my list of subscriptions. I never really thought about it until I’ve had to write about it right now, but what a bad design. It’s listed alphabetically, and if you’re like me and you’ve been using Youtube for years, you’ve got a lot of subscriptions, many of which might no longer be active.
I have to click “Show More” since the initial view hardly made it past my subscriptions beginning with the letter A. Scrolling down, for some reason, I forget all about looking for a sports highlights video, as one of the listed channels catches my eye. There’s no dot next to it indicating a new upload, and perhaps that’s the issue. It’s one of those channels which seems to be no longer active.
It’s the Youtube channel of one of my old friends. Maybe, like I said, it’s the mood I’m in today. Feeling wistful already, why not feel a little more misty-eyed? Since I’m motivated enough to write about it, you can probably already guess that my relationship with this person hasn’t been the most ordinary. But people always say that, don’t they?
In a nutshell, she was someone I met very early on after I moved to this country. There were ups and downs in our friendship, we got on very easily but there was always an unexplained veil of obfuscation that she would hide certain details of her life behind. This especially became an issue as we got closer. There was actually a time when our relationship had progressed to a point where we were on the verge of becoming more than friends, but trust issues derailed things so badly that our friendship on the whole was entirely thrown off the tracks. We stopped speaking, and for a time I thought we were both better off.
Years passed, eventually nostalgia got the better of me (as today’s writing will prove, it still does) and I threw out a line. I got a response and our friendship entered a second phase, which was decidedly more stable but less intense. We would randomly send messages off and on. Sometimes we’d chat daily, but much more often we were not really saying anything for a month or two, then there’d be a random check-in and catch-up, and that was that.
She was still secretive about things. It was especially weird to me by then, because we were older and I thought we had kind of moved past the tumultuous times of our early 20’s. It’s crazy, actually, to think that this “second phase” of our friendship that I’m describing began nearly ten years ago, and thus it’s nearly twenty years ago that we first met. I don’t like confronting this fact, but I had to remark on it nonetheless. Ugh…
Wait, what was I saying? Ah yes, by that point, we were older, and I had at least moved on with life and it seemed like she had as well. I was open with things like what I was working on, where I was living, how I had found a stable life partner, and a stable life in general, et cetera. Sometimes she would share equally as much, but other times, the same issue from before reared its head.
Less important to me now to know her wheres, whats, and whys, I would just let it go. She seemed bothered by the mere act of asking, though. So at times I felt like I was walking on eggshells, not wanting to broach aspects she didn’t want to share, but otherwise still getting along with my old friend just as well as we ever had.
A couple of years ago, she mentioned that she was trying her hand at making content on Youtube. She asked me to subscribe to her channel and in a way it kind of surprised me, as she was sharing a lot more of her life in these vlogs than I was accustomed to getting from her in our conversations. The videos were actually decently-produced with real effort behind them, not just someone rambling into a camera (or typing aimlessly on a blog, ahem). She had a few thousand views on most of her videos, some of them tens of thousands, which seemed successful to me, at least compared to the few random videos I had put up on Youtube over the years.
Every so often, a new video would appear. Sometimes there would be gaps of a week, a month or even two, but that’s just how it always goes, isn’t it? (Ahem, ahem.) So it wouldn’t be atypical to not see her post something for a while.
Then one day about a year and a half ago, I noticed on the messaging app we used, in my message list there was a chat with a blank icon and the name “Empty Room.” Clicking on it showed me that it was the message thread I’d had with this person. For this particular app, this could mean one of two things: she had either blocked me or she had deleted her entire account.
I couldn’t think of anything that would have brought about her blocking me, as we hadn’t even been actively talking at the time. But again, I never knew if some topic I had asked about in the past might’ve irritated her, perhaps to the point of just wanting me out of her life without notice. I considered it unlikely that she would delete her entire presence from a popular messaging app that is basically essential for life here.
Regardless, it seemed like a clear indication that no more contact was wanted, and I tried to accept the situation for what it was. Honestly, I assumed I must’ve done something wrong, as I’ve never been good at catching social cues.
But I would be lying if I said I hadn’t tried to reach out after that. I had noticed in the ensuing months that zero new videos from her appeared on my Youtube feed. I thought maybe she had blocked me there as well, if that is even possible. But no, obviously I am still subscribed even to this day, which is what prompted this entry. There was just an abrupt stop in uploads.
But again, fine, people get busy, lose interest, change priorities, change circumstances, et cetera. It’s not something I thought about all the time. As I said, by this point, we were not close nor talking too often, it wasn’t as if a piece of my life was suddenly missing.
About eight months ago, I had dreams involving her, two in one night. They were mundane in nature, one involving a dinner with relatives and the other an airplane ride where we bumped into each other. But as much as I like to consider myself a rational person, unprompted repetitive dreams do tend to stick in my craw, making me wonder if the universe is sending me a sign.
So I dropped her another line the next day, much as I had done almost ten years ago, which prompted the “second phase.” There has been, up to this point, no response, no “third phase,” if you will. As I said, this was eight months ago. There was definitely a time shortly after sending the message where I expected to hear from her, but as the days passed, it obviously seemed increasingly unlikely and it eventually slipped from my radar.
Until today, scrolling through my list of Youtube subscriptions. So, of course, what did I do but click on her channel. Who knows, maybe there had been an upload after all this time, I thought. Nope, nothing. The latest video is still the same one, but I clicked it anyway, curious perhaps if there was some update in the description or something along those lines.
No update. There was, however, a comment posted a mere three months ago. As I read it, I realize the commenter was also apparently a friend of this person. In the comment, she expresses some concern and worry, wondering why she hadn’t been able to contact our mutual friend for several months and asking if everything was okay.
There was no follow-up or reply to the comment. And I felt, for a moment, extremely disconcerted.
Even though it was a negative event, it was vanity, I suppose, to assume that I was the cause of whatever led to the abrupt termination of communication. Maybe in the back of my mind, I had considered there might’ve been something else going on, but I always just circled back to thinking, “Nah, it must be me. She hates me.”
The comment that I stumbled upon on this Youtube video upended that for me. In a true display of how selfish my thoughts had been, I contended for the first time with the real possibility that perhaps something really bad had happened to my friend. Something bad enough where she had no further contact with everyone she knew. I feel like I don’t need to enumerate all the possibilities here.
And then I felt a weird sinking feeling. That I’ll probably never know, one way or the other. That is another aspect of her secretiveness, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to reach out to get information beyond the avenues I already tried.
I hope, as the girl writing the comment on Youtube did, that everything is okay. It’s weird to feel worried about someone but likewise know that you will almost certainly never know what happened or happens to them, and that it won’t really affect your experiences going forward because they have already been removed from your life for a long time.
And then I thought about this place. Is there anyone out there thinking I’m dead? It hasn’t been years or even that many months, but still. Silence. It seems unlikely, but just in case, here are these words, and let me assure you, I’m not dead. FYI.