What follows is an autobiographical note. The names of the parties involved have been altered in order to protect their anonymity.
Lament
In July of 2007, I wrote a fictionalized account of events to which I had been a witness, and cast the result in the form of a poem. The Moonlight Flower is the story of how a great love was first found and later lost, told by a broken man to his best friend. It is a lamentation and a cautionary tale, but also a celebration of friendship. Its title alludes to the opening lines of an untitled poem by Brian C., to whom the tale is dedicated.
In a terrible twist of fate, the publication of my poem about a man's loss of his beloved coincided with my loss of the man whose poems I loved. Not long after posting my humble tribute as a review of his journal, I saw Brian online and wrote immediately to tell him proudly of my deed. This was the first and last time that he did not reply to a message from me. I don't know when, precisely, Brian logged out on that day — never to log in again.
A couple of weeks later, anyone hoping to read Brian's poetry had to look for it in Google's cache.
Escape
Earlier,
Brian had written to tell me that,
with the help of his lady,
he had recently emerged from a difficult time,
and was feeling all loved up
again.
I was glad that a worthwhile person was the beneficiary
of all the time he had not been giving his friends,
and I could only approve of Brian's decision
to curtail his online activity for the sake of his marriage.
But I also wanted to stay in touch with Brian
–
if only casually, sporadically, and over email.
To this end,
I posted a note inquiring as to his whereabouts,
and hoped for the best.
Eventually,
someone who had (upon a time) been intimate with Brian
found my message in a bottle and
wrote to tell me how I might find him.
Unfortunately, though, when I finally caught up with him,
he said he did not want to keep in touch with anybody online:
he had been doing better since coming off the Internet
,
and he didn't want to endanger his newfound peace.
Brian had managed to escape into real life,
and that was the end of the story… for him.
Questions
Why did he leave? I used to think about it a lot — so much that I started questioning the nature of my feelings on the matter. The joy I felt upon receiving the news of Brian's newfound happiness had been genuine… and so was the lasting sorrow over the disappearance of my friend. Something about this juxtaposition made me nauseous; my head spun with introspection gone wrong. And, thus, the ceaseless pondering led to new questions that were more focused, but also more uncomfortable because they implicated me inescapably.
Brian had entertained the courtship of another poet online (which, serious or not, can't have pleased his partner) but he had put things right — or so he said. Let us suppose for a moment that he had been mistaken and that the ensuing complications somehow forced him offline. Considering that I was unaware of the goings-on until he revealed them to me, and that he had been glad to call me a friend when the imbroglio came to light, why did Brian not want to remain in contact with me after leaving the Internet?
My self-mortification did not end there, though.
For me,
Brian had existed only as an online persona.
I never did get to meet Brian and, admittedly,
I couldn't be sure that he wasn't just
another user's secret identity
.
But that's not what ate me.
No, I would have felt the same whether he was
a complete fabrication or an honest portrayal of a real person.
And that was the problem:
how could the knowledge that Apeman may have been
a disposable alter
not alleviate my sense
of loss in the slightest?
Closure
Relief from these preoccupations
came in the form of another loss:
one day,
I stopped believing
in the underpinning lie.
As I grew comfortable with the notion that
mourning the loss of an online persona
(the mere idea of a person, if you will)
is as legitimate as grieving at a funeral,
my musings turned bolder.
Could it be
–
I wondered
–
that,
in the realm of the mind,
the dichotomy
real versus virtual
is false?
That, be it on- or off-line,
each of our personae is somehow real
to those who experience it?
That humans are capable of inhabiting
(albeit not simultaneously)
several different personae,
drawing from each as needed?
Could it be that
identity is actually synthetic and context-driven?
Once I had accepted that
the conundrum vexing me stemmed from fallacious perspective,
the cognitive dissonance at the root of my discomfort
was exposed as a simple case of mistaken identity:
Brian and Apeman
were not,
as I had thought,
a single, indivisible entity.
Brian
(the flesh-and-blood man who had become estranged from his wife)
had a new lease on life,
but
my friend
(the sentient being from whose NIC flowed the writings I loved)
was gone forever
—
murdered by Brian in self-defense.
And, upon this realization, I let go of the last shred of hope that still remained, and made my peace with the virtual passing of Brian C.