My Old Friend

This morning I dreamt about it. I was looking for my old bloopdiary friends, in my dream. I was surprised to find one, my BEST online friend, and tried to start talking to them but my keyboard wasn't working properly, meanwhile they were typing non stop and I couldn't keep up, I felt terrible for not being able to respond appropriately to everything they were saying - not that anything they were saying was important, and that was frustrating, too - and when I could type some stuff I'd look up and realise I'd hit caps lock so it looked like I was either excited or angry shouting, and that made me SO FRUSTRATED. They were telling me everything about their life now, which is normal stuff for a 30-something year old, like their young daughter (which was so annoying because I have a teenage son and everyone I know has young kids and I am sick of feeling soooo outside) and I was so frustrated because I wanted to talk to the good friend I had as a teenager. I wanted them to be the person they were as a teenager, which of course being online as a teen in the early 2000s a lot of it was fake, but also authentic - no pictures, just text, melodrama, innocence but thinking you were anything but.... I wanted that person to be the same. I was getting so angry that I couldn't type properly, I had three different keyboards, chucking tantrums in the front yard (I was there for some reason instead of inside my house...)

I wanted to tell them, remember that time when my dog died, and we talked together all day and all night, about dolphins having sex, and it was the most hilarious thing? The. Most. Hilarious. Thing. And I look up and see they're talking about their ancestry, about some of it coming from Australia, and is it possible we could be related? I wanted to tell them - god, no, it's not possible, but let's put a pin in that because I need to scroll up and read everything else you've written - but god please stay for as long as it takes for me to find a keyboard that works! Please don't disappear for another ten years. I've been looking for you for ten years, in my dreams, actively looking for you - in real life, not so much. But in my dreams, you are a reoccurring figure and I am always trying to contact you, but you are never there, but occasionally, I'll see you signed in and left me a brief message two months ago and I missed you again. In my dreams, you never want to talk. In this dream, you wouldn't stop talking, so much so it didn't seem right, but I couldn't communicate with you... I just wanted to ask you to still be the same you as you were to the me I was, back then.
 

Back then, you saved me. I hope I saved you. I'm alive, are you? We thought we were both barely surviving back then, both barely real... but the friendship was so real and alive... and I think about it often. I want that same silliness and seriousness and connection. Feeling like I could be my real me with you. It was so beautiful. We were so beautiful, and everybody thought so. Remember that? An enigma. Still! An enigma.

Now, outside of my dream, I don't care if you have changed. I don't care what you want to talk about, or if you have nothing in particular to say. I don't care if you talk about your young daughter, or your piano lessons, or your ancestry, I don't care if everything you say is pointless and completely different to the purposeful, powerful (weak?) person you used to be. Be a different person, a completely different person, a different gender, a different lifestyle, a different name, I DON'T care, I really don't, just be you and talk to me. I have so much to tell you.