Threads

[Forward]

As you sit down something feels different. Not in a bad way, granted it’s a little peculiar, but in a way that reminds of you of rememory. You know those days/nights where something happens; a celebration, you met this guy/girl who inspired a growling lust and you fucked and they disappeared and you couldn’t stop thinking about the (questionable) Grecian divinity of their chest, and tonight, a ghost storms in from the periphery, a previously… montage, as if carved by the same (questionable) mason, and you realise that the architect of memory is some malicious, dogged joker of your own creation, with nimble fingers flicking through boxes of film, maniacal in his incessant, like, bullying, man; or nothing in particular, you just sit and think about your life and everything that’s led you to where you are with mornings on evenings on afternoons of doing, each positing a reminder of what you could have done, what you will do, or how great/bad you were/are; each ultimately dependent on whichever way you choose to spiral; or the job, the career, the obstacles of progress/the brick wall lack-of; the boss with the flamboyant pomposity of a pantomime villain spliced with a real-world awkward disregard for your humanity built by cups of tea, coffee, and passive-aggression, micro-aggression, like you’re-way-too-upset-about-this-get-a-life aggression, criticising, condescending, mustering nothing other than a pat on the back that says no more than thanks, bitch; the dopey-eyed co-worker you hope and pray is a human, and not some fleshy prototype specifically designed to enrage employees into hard work; the people that you have to deal with, the unforgiving, ungrateful, money machines, existing by and for each digit. Fuck. You sigh. You slouch, sink into the furniture, and your rememory starts to chatter. You can almost feel it start to rise and flicker before your eyes. But, no. Fuck that. Here are your options; try and sleep; go to the kitchen and make one of your awesome late night snacks; lie in bed and pretend to fall asleep, and succumb; open a book, read; turn on the TV, Netflix, or whatever’s on. But really, you wrap fingers around your extra limb. You press the button, swipe, tap digits/draw a pattern, and you open the door.

[Jeremyohmyah: Thread]

I’ll never forget watching a beheading. It was on some website my friend showed me, he sat with his laptop on his knees as I leaned to avoid the glare on the screen. As gruesome as it sounds, it was an important experience. The video opened with a group of Taliban addressing the camera. Then it panned to the guy, the poor guy, a reporter, and then they cut his head off with a saw. He gurgled, he spluttered, still alive half way through. They sweated, they shouted and prayed. When I was younger I used to listen to the Foo Fighters and play Flashplayer games on my parents’ old desktop for hours. That kid would have been traumatised. Swimming with my horror and despair, I found a warm patch of gratitude; This was the reality. I had been sheltered and now, I guess, I knew.

I’ve been told that generations are defined by the innovation that grows with them; radio, film, television, and the internet. I think it’s insidious. It’s weird to think that your concentration, personality, and dialect can be shaped by a technology, but it makes some kind of sense. I don’t remember the first time I ever sent an e-mail, or used an instant messenger service, but I used them a lot during secondary school. I used to sit at my computer for hours listening to pop-punk and talking to my friends. I don’t even remember the websites I used to go on, or what I used to do apart from talk, and gossip. We used to collect emoticons and laugh at them. Most were crude, stick men slapping each other in the face with massive dicks, cartoon characters throwing up on each other, cutting their own cartoon hands off, all sorts of obscenities and violence perfectly caricatured into hilarity. It was immature and childish, but that’s all I can remember doing at the time. Now and then, we’d catch each other saying ‘LOL’ or ‘OMG’ in conversation and laugh, but each and every one of us did it, and will. Probably more ironically, or in the midst of nostalgia as time wears on, but it’ll happen.

Needless to say, as well as talking to people I knew, I talked to people I didn’t. I had no idea what they looked like, if they had brown eyes or blue? No idea. Only names, and even then, some of them were probably made up. I was quite lucky, I never found myself talking to a paedo or some creepy-psycho-dude, everyone I talked too appeared genial, eccentric but nice. My friend introduced me to this girl that he had started talking to on a forum. She was nice, we hit it off, she liked me, we wanted to meet up, she backed out, but we remained friends, from MySpace and beyond. My friendship group and hers intertwined, and I had no idea how to define what they were, other than my friends. It didn’t feel real. Half of the people I knew, I could touch or unfortunately smell. The other half were just words on a screen or a voice through a phone. Then webcams came around, but by that time the strains of any internet relationship had taken its toll. We didn’t talk. The nights I used to spend talking to her on the internet had been replaced by copious amounts of social anxiety, creativity, and small chats with the straggling friends of hers that still liked to talk to me. One was from America, she was an exhibitionist.

The first person I loved, I met when I was sixteen. Hannah was a friend of the exhibitionist and we’d started talking through her. She was from Arizona, had a younger brother, and liked the same music I did, conversation started out that way, but descended into this weird diatribe where I’d constantly be trying to get her out of her shell, and her clothes. The first time I saw her on webcam, she hid under her computer table. When she came out she apologised and told me that she was embarrassed because she didn’t want me to see her blush. Her cheeks were red, her eyes were a clear green, and she smiled and blushed whenever I said something. We started talking in the summer when I drank too much Red Bull, and a pattern emerged. I would stay up into the early hours of the morning, online, waiting to speak to her. Her profile picture used to rise like a mechanical sun above the twenty-four hour clock in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen. We talked for months at a time, every night, until school started again. Then it was periodical, until summer, then winter and spring came again, I sat in secondary school classrooms with real people, real teachers talking about real things, waiting for those summer nights that flickered into those summer days that I spent asleep, dreaming of someone I had never laid eyes on.

I started a band with one of my friends shortly after I met Hannah. We covered pop-punk songs on acoustic guitars waiting for the day when we could afford Gibson amps and Fender guitars. We never bought them. The wooded ring caught our hearts and ears as our music taste developed. We downloaded songs like we streamed porn, for free. Eventually we wrote our first song, it was called ‘The Best Smile’. (Yeah, you don’t have to tell me, I know). We posted it up on MySpace and managed to get a couple hundred listeners and friends. I used to reply to comments people left on our profile, taking part in a strange sort of small talk that stretched out over seconds or days. Hannah was an avid fan, and even started her own band with her younger brother. In the same vein they wrote soppy love songs, but her brother had a penchant for FruityLoops and they produced weird kinda melodic dishwasher music with angsty teenage poetry sung over the top. Our production was similar; mine fizzled out as I found a newsagent that would sell me alcohol and cigarettes, and hers faded into the aether as she discovered marijuana and cough syrup.

By this time we had been sending videos to each other. They were pretty mundane, taking tours of our houses, playing guitar, covering songs, complimenting each other, or just doodling. They were like little snippets of our own perspective, coded, uploaded, and downloaded into our hard drives, kept safe for whenever we were lonely. We were introverts that had found each other through a convoluted maze of friends-introducing-friends-to-friends on the internet. A part of me could not help but question whether I liked her or a figment of her, made up from a personality I garnered and a personality I wanted to adore? Were we akin to a kind of melancholic love that only festered from a distance? She never thought of it that way, and it’s something I’ll never know.

The first time I went to America was strange. I had always expected I would be meeting Hannah, but that wasn’t the case. I was on a family holiday with my parents going to visit my eldest brother in New York, while he was teaching there. We wanted to spend Christmas and New Years with him. Unfortunately for us, the North-East had been plastered with thick layer of snow. It took us ages to land. Everyone was sat in their seat, rows of people frustrated, twiddling, silently going out of their minds. I was bored, I had finished the only book I’d brought, and my laptop was in my parent’s house. Two things happened, I realised how much I depended on the internet, and I realised that meeting Hannah was something I had to do before I died. It would be something I would always regret if I didn’t.

After a tedious week trapped by snow in a small apartment with my parents and brother, the snow had melted. We rented an apartment in a complex near Central Park. Fifteen stories high the view was beautiful, and one day when my parents, my brother and his husband, decided to go on a walk through the park, I decided to stay in the apartment because ‘I felt ill’. I messaged Hannah on Facebook, and she called the apartment’s telephone. We spoke for hours. We repeated ourselves, things we had told each other years previously, and things we had said only an hour or two before. It was weird. I hung up when everyone returned, slamming the phone down onto the receiver, they didn’t notice, they don’t know. I finished the second script I had ever written that night. It was about a guy meeting a girl in a Seattle apartment. He was one of those pretentious, woe-be-gone, protagonists. The love interest was a manic-pixie-dream girl, and the prose was separated by the lyrics to Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley. Yeah, it was bad. But Hannah liked it. That meant a lot at the time. My parents and I travelled back to England. I went back to sixth form, and everything went back to normal.

A few days after I came back from New York I made a ‘bucket list’. Friends added to it too (stupid things like ‘don’t listen to music for a week’ - that’s never going to happen), but the most important part on the list, number 103 – Meet H. A year or so later, in the beginnings of my first relationship, my girlfriend asked me who ‘H’ was. I lied, I said it was a guy called Harry that I knew in America, not far from the truth, she found out eventually