One of my closest friends is a complete stranger. It’s not that she’s recently done something wildly out of character, or even that some harrowing secret has just surfaced and permanently altered my perception of her. I mean it in the truest sense: although I talk to her every day, I know practically nothing about her. We have never even met. We probably never will.
It’s strange, but not as strange as it sounds. I asked a couple of my group chats about it, and most of us have, or have had, a friendship like this. We met them on MySpace, in LiveJournal communities, over angsty teenage poetry on Tumblr, in the comments sections of Instagram posts.
Over the years, I’ve collected a few friends this way, from Bournemouth to Ontario to Dubai and back, following one another from platform to platform, forging deep bonds and inside jokes.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
I’ve met one or two of them, when inconvenient layovers make for convenient excuses to see if our textual chemistry can thrive in the sunlight. Good news: it can!
This isn’t really a new concept, either. Gen X had forums and messenger apps, Boomers loved their anonymous chat rooms, and pen pals existed long before the postal service. Friendship from afar: just another thing Millennials didn’t invent – but maybe we’ve perfected it.
This friend and I live in opposite time zones, so I often find a flurry of messages from her right under my morning alarm. Details about another clash with her work nemesis, a stupid video about a gay labrador, a recipe for a single-serve protein brownie, her stream of consciousness at the gym, our horoscopes, a picture of her cat. “Good morning” is what this chaotic deluge really says. “I love you! From all the way over here!”
Loading
In some ways, she is who I share my life with. She was the first person I told about my book deal. I’ve talked her through a panic attack or 12. We know things about one another that even our therapists have never heard. Battle scars and late-night feelings, hopes for our futures and all our big mistakes, politics, plans, baby names, bad dates, joy, grief, and everything in between – there is almost nothing we don’t share, except for a few crucial details.
Our surnames, for instance. Our email addresses, where we work, or any actual identifying information about the real person behind the screen. If either of us ever asked, I think we would probably be happy to share some of this. But perhaps we wouldn’t. Maybe we like it this way.