My First Friend and the Internet

She was my best friend when I was four years old. She came into my life before the period in elementary school when I had one friend. I don’t really remember having more than one friend in preschool, but the fact that I liked to read didn’t seem to be as much of a problem then as it became.
Her parents had a lot of ideas of how to raise children. They enrolled them in art and language classes. My parents probably would have done the same for me, but about the time I became friends with her, they started a long and bitter divorce and custody battle. They spent tens of thousands of dollars and loaded me up with emotional baggage, all in the name of spending an extra day a week with me. Twenty years later, I know the whole thing had nothing to do with me, true concern for my well-being could have meant saving that money for college and making me learn an instrument. Then again, had anything about that been different, I wouldn't be who I am now. Someone who made it to first chair in the 7th grade orchestra faking the ability to read music and comfortable with wanderlust, since it was never a big deal to pack a toothbrush.
I did love to read. I remember her dad scolding my dad, saying she wasn’t allowed to read The Babysitter’s Club like I was, she was only allowed to read “the classics.” While I read and dreamed about being from New York, like Stacy, or wearing purple tights under yellow shorts like Claudia, her parents moved the family from St. Paul out to a third-ring suburb. The schools were better.
She and I fell out of touch, although our dads continued to talk, eventually email when technology caught up. My dad passed on a photo slideshow from her wedding last summer and I spent a long time looking at how similar she looked in it as she did when we were four.
Last summer she found me on myspace and sent me a message. “Oh my God, you were my best friend when I was four!” I looked at her profile. She’d been living on the west coast, graduated from college out there. Now she and her husband were living in Thailand. I wrote back, telling her I saw the pictures of her wedding, it was beautiful. I told her I graduated from college, lived in New York and was moving back to the Midwest to go to law school. She never wrote back. A couple of months later, I found her blog through myspace. I spent hours reading all of the back entries. I read about her four-year struggle with heroin addiction. I read about her stint as a call girl, to support the drug habit. I read her poetry and her ideas about the world. I felt so strange, because I was suddenly so sure she read my message over the summer and, well, thought I was totally lame. To her, I feared, she is a tortured artistic soul and I am run of the mill, condemned to living a small life within the system. Having never battled something like an IV-drug addiction… I don’t know… but something about it seemed romanticized. That through this dark history she was planning to take her place among The Greats. And what would I do? Toil away through a lifetime of small victories? From a distance, and totally within my own head, I resented her view of me. And also vaguely feared it was true.
I kept reading the blog, periodically. I read about her husband turning abusive, I read about her misery in Thailand, I read about her leaving her husband and returning home for Christmas. As I kept reading, I felt like I was getting to know her again. Her profile song on myspace now is one of my favorites. I don’t think we’d be friends now, but I also don’t think she would think I am totally lame. All of this is what is so strange about the internet, folks putting personal information up for anyone to read. The seeming inevitability that I would stumble across her corner of it and read that. That everything that’s lost is found again, here in the future. And at some point, she may stumble across my corner and read this… Hi.