I suppose I am still a rather pessimistic person. I’ve been going down memory lane and thought of the people I had befriended on the Internet over the past decade. When I write befriended I mean really befriended. In all it is five people.

Jacqueline – Merc
Lori – Yorkie
Paul – princeofdarknessUK
Erin – Neko Otaku
Eileen – CrazyPuppY

Merc had been the first friend I made on the net to the point we knew each other’s real names. When was then? I know I messed on the computer back when I was around twelve. I think I met her around 1998. I read a lot more net fiction than I do now back then. That is how we met.
She wrote a fiction that made me laugh – something that was missing in my life. I was a depressed kid and she had made me smile. I wrote her an email or a review. I misread her pen name and she found it hilarious. After that I read all of her fictions and we got to know one another.
She was maybe a year older than me and she had a sister. I even knew what state she lived in. I was there when she put up a site and I contributed pictures to it. It was a nice time.
Well, as all things go in my life, we lost contact. She more or less dropped off the face of the Internet for all I know. I had tried her email, but pretty much… she’s gone.
A year or so later I met someone else. She was more than twice my age and a wonderfully funny, caring and sometimes annoying woman. Again, we met due to my emailing her about a fiction she wrote. Again, she had been a person to make me laugh. By then I was becoming very depressed so there were few things that made me laugh and smile.
She was a person who could listen to problem of a troubled kid, I found. It was rather relieving I found. I confided in her and she considered me as one of her “children”. I found out later she had other net friends, younger than her, that she considered her kids. They usually called her Yorkie-mama. I never really got into that.
It was meeting her though, did I finally get the courage to tell my mother my problems. One night I had been contemplating suicide and scared myself in the end. No one was on the net, so I couldn’t talk to anyone. It was in that moment I decided. I had been able to talk to a person I had never met in real life about my problems… so why was I so afraid to talk to my parents.
That night I woke my mother up and more or less poured my heart out to her for an hour full of sobbing and such. If I had never opened up to Yorkie and found a sort of solace in her listening to me… I doubt I ever would have told my mother such things… at least not so soon.
I kept up with Yorkie for about three to four years. In that time I learned a lot about her as well. She had a family of her own. She had a child and a husband. She had issues in her own past and despite so much darkness she turned out to be a lovely lady.
She dropped off the Internet around 2002. I never knew what happened to her. I can only guess… and what I guess is the worst possible scenario. As said, she had darkness in her life. A darkness that followed her through life had been confided to me. In loss I often wonder if it finally took its toll on her. I can do nothing to find out.
Sigh…
PoDUK… I met him around the time I was fourteen. We met on a forum. He was nice, friendly and actually talked to me, which was something that doesn’t occur often. We became friends and to an extent even more. I’d write more on him, but I know somewhere I wrote a good long entry on him back in 2003. It likely isn’t in this journal, but it is somewhere in my old one I am sure.
A funny thing though… We met again last night. We talked for hours. It was nice. He seems to be doing well in life and he’s learned what all has happened in mine since we last chatted. He doesn’t seem disturbed. Good times.
Next up would be Neko. I met her on a board back in 2004. Nice, friendly and fun to be around, we managed to befriend each other. Like all the previous people listed, I opened up to her enough to the point I showed her a story I worked on for years. Yorkie saw it when it had only been four notebook paper sheets long. PoDUK had seen it when developed more. Neko saw it near its ending process.
It was not long after her sister appeared on the forum. Before I knew they were related, I started befriending her. She went by CrazyPuppY. She was fondly shortened to CP. From then until 2006 we were friends. We worked on an RP together and had good times on that. We chatted, I learned a lot about their family and they learned about me.
The two of them and I were a lot alike in some aspects. I felt understood by them. We sometimes even spouted dreams of living together and the like. I admit, I never believed in such occurring, but it is nice to dream every once in a while just for a smile.
Time passed on though and they began trying to spread their wings. They had gone to a convention and I believe that is what began their awakening. They moved to NY for a time and we slowly stopped talking so much. They were growing and at one point they housed a friend from the board while he was tracking around the states. Slowly they disappeared from the Internet. The last I saw of them was an email from Neko during the summer of 2006.
Upon thinking of those relationships… it makes me think of dreaming. The Internet provides relationships that are like a nice dream I’d say. At least, it is for me. I sort of doubt a person can make a lasting relationship with someone over the net. At least, in my case that is so.
It goes nice, there are happy times and then… one day you wake up and it is all gone. That is how they work for me. One day a person just disappears. The funny thing is, I think I was the one who did that with PoDUK really rather than him to me. We found each other again, though, last night. While I lack interest in being hopeful I’m glad we talked last night. Maybe it will continue on. That would be nice, I think. Just as nice as I think it would be to see all the others again and rekindle something.