A couple of weeks ago I was sent a Facebook friend request from a girl I went to high school with. She was a year younger than me. She was also pretty, athletic and popular. I was none of those. Obviously, we weren’t friends then. My sister who gave me a dressing down about not going to my 25th Class Reunion (sweet fuck, I’m old), said people change and I should be more open to reconnecting with people. It’s not like she can make fun of my buck teeth or flat chest anymore. She said that while we weren’t BFFs then, there’s no harm in just being FBFs now.
She had a point.
With that in mind I accepted this person’s request and opened the floodgates of all those school (a.k.a. purgatory) memories, not to mention the possibility I would now be on the radar of some people I hadn’t thought of, much less seen, in the past two decades.
Today I saw one of her posts on my feed. She’s a regular poster, not like some who seek out friends for the numbers and then never post, so I knew she was on FB frequently. Not as frequently as myself, but routinely. She wrote about whoknowswhat and I realized that even though I had accepted her request two weeks ago and we’re both on FB, that neither of us had written on each others’ walls.
In that moment, I went ahead and blocked her.
Facebook Friends is a misnomer. We were Facebook Stats; Facebook Quotas, but we were not Facebook Friends. We never would be. I like my tight-knit group of friends that I keep easily under 200. Most I have forgotten who their blogging identity belongs to as it doesn’t matter because I see real people with either very similar or very different thoughts than me and that’s pretty sweet. We don’t seem to let our polar views on politics or raising children or fashion take a front seat to having a connection in spirit. It’s a connection made out of a heady mix of grief and joy; one impossible to make when one is only 15, 16, or 17 years old. I’ve allowed a handful of other IRL people as FBFs, but it’s on a trial basis. If they’re lucky, I’ll keep them around and let them peek into my life once in a while and hobnobbed with the meaningful people I’ve had as FBFs.
As it was in Blogging, so shall it be on Facebook.
Punch Drunk 