a little less conversation

The message arrives late one night, lighting up my MSN chat window. I can’t remember what it said now, all these years later. Maybe it was a simple ‘hi’. Perhaps a more developed question. Either way, some animal instinct in me recognised it for what it actually was: pretext. A boy I had almost no contact with in the musty school halls we shared daily, was reaching out to establish a connection in this dream-like terrain of pixels and dancing pig alerts. Anything was possible in the unreality of online, even forming relationships and intimacies that would be unthinkable in the material world, where the threat of an awkward moment — god forbid! — loomed large. The harsh screen light seemed exposing but the opposite was true; it was cloaking. Safe.

Becoming a rabid epistolarian is a great teenage rite of passage. Now it skews a bit more visual: communicating via Snapchat, TikTok and Insta DMs. My generation had Bebo, MSN, BBM and Facebook Messenger. Two decades before us, the kids just used pens and paper to begin trying to voice the rush of thoughts and feelings that were starting to swallow them up.

Some of these letters are written to the self — diary entries and such. Some are to friends. And others go to burgeoning romantic interests, swapping confidences and opening up on the page.

It took me until my early twenties to understand relationships formed through the written word alone were built on pillars of sand. Or perhaps, more accurate to say it wasn’t until my early twenties that I began to long for something flesh and blood. Up until then, I’d been happy with long spiralling conversations that went deep into the wee hours, allowing men — boys, back then — to unpack themselves to me.

Sometimes, on particularly heady occasions, I would receive a confession of ‘love’. The next day would ignore each other in the corridor on the way to a lesson, flushing scarlet and sliding our eyes away. Our physical bodies had not built the intimacy and ease our minds had. Half of us were confidants; the other half, strangers.