how to disappear completely (and never be found)
searching for early online acquaintances in the age of using your real name online
Nick is what I’d describe as devilishly handsome.
He was a charming Australian with fucking impeccable teeth. He had incredible taste in clothes, music, and movies. He loved The OC and Scissor Sisters and was an incredible writer and unabashedly bisexual.
In short, he was just about everything I wanted to be, whether or not I knew it at the time.
And despite the fact that we lived so far apart that we existed on literal separate days, he was kind enough to host my (terrible) blog on his vinylinvasion URL during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school.
We met as part of a loose blog ring. He was acquainted with another friend of mine, a web developer from the UK named Lawrie. Lawrie got well-known in online circles due to an article about being straightedge and also a quiz he made to tell you what Jedi you would be. Lawrie ended up hosting my blog for a few years before I bit the bullet and paid for my own web hosting, which I’ve done on and off now for the past few years.
I’m actually still friends with Lawrie and with a few other people from that network, including Alexandra (a teacher from Canada). I occasionally keep tabs on the singer/songwriter/graphic designer Elliot Caroll, whose own website was hosted by Nick. She’s immensely talented, but we sort of fell out of contact around the same time that Myspace collapsed, and if anything she has ended up far more famous and successful than I could ever hope to be. I frankly doubt she remembers our conversations about Garden State (!) and Death Cab for Cutie (!!).
There was another member of the vinylinvasion collective named Kat, and she was a musical theater obsessive from Pennsylvania. She was dark and mysterious and sexy, impenetrable and cool. We flirted a lot that year. Heavily. She snapped blurry webcam photos and uploaded them for my benefit. She would occasionally record breathy, flirty audio messages that often took 15 minutes or more for me to download because they were .WAV files and I only had dial-up internet. Hers was the kind of attention I’d never really gotten from girls, and I greedily took as much of it as I could.
For whatever reason, we stopped talking around the same time I went to college, and to this day I’m not exactly sure why.
I thought about Nick—and by extension Kat and Elliot—for the first time in a long time last week, spurred on by a bit of midweek boredom (and because Lawrie tweeted something funny. In the 16 years I’ve known him, he has always been funny). But I can’t remember (if I ever knew) Nick’s last name. I could barely remember where he lived.
I looked up his screen names and handles and found next to nothing. I went to the Wayback Machine to scour archived versions of his site for any kind of useful information. I was desperate to find him and to discover what became of his life. I needed to know where he ended up, this man who was immensely talented and good-looking. What does he do now, as an adult, that could fulfill all this promise I have built him up to have had.
The only things I found were a link to a long-abandoned DeviantArt profile and a sketchy as hell website from the mid-2000’s where men of all ages posted photos of themselves in underwear.
My search for Kat was just as fruitless. I used every variation of her name that I could remember, but I found absolutely nothing. I did, however, accidentally click on a fair number of Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles for women who—upon much closer examination—are not the Kat that I knew back then. I hope she’s doing well, wherever she is. She had big dreams of make-up artistry and singing. I remember her as immensely talented.
There are other members of that social circle whose names I can’t remember, but whose websites I recall. They’re just as difficult to find. And for the ones I have kept in contact with, how do you start a conversation? Do you ask, “Hey, remember that friend of yours? What are they up to now? Did you have a falling out?” My motivations are pure curiosity more than any real desire for connection; I follow plenty of people I want to be friends or friendly with now. There are at least a dozen people in Kansas City that I’ve known for a decade through Twitter and Instagram that I haven’t had the chance to hang out with.
Adding a handful of people I talked to more than ten years ago to the mix just seems like asking for trouble.
What I am interested in is how someone can simply cease to exist on the internet. Because that’s what it feels like these people have done. I’ve changed screen names a handful of times in the past 15 years, but searching for my old ones yields some results. You can trace a line, however jagged or disjointed, from those early usernames to the @dougmessel I use (for better or worse) in almost all instances of my online existence.
I search for Nick or Kat or Christina and find zero evidence that they exist today in a modern context. If it weren’t for archived websites or conversations with Lawrie about these acquaintances, I would almost be deluded into thinking that I’ve made them up.
And in the grand scheme of things, these two years may not really matter all that much! It definitely doesn’t feel as formative as the two or three years I spent living in anime-focused chat rooms pretending to be someone else, or the very real moments of college heartbreak and failure I endured before meeting my wife and falling head over heels for her.
But I still think back on that time fondly. For all the terrible words I put to paper and the very, very rudimentary web design (and badly photoshopped header images) I proudly threw out there, these were real connections! They were meaningful interactions over a period of time where I didn’t know who—or what—I wanted to be in a tumultuous transition prior to leaving for college.
I’d really like to thank them for playing a part in that, however small. So I suppose I’ll keep looking up their names every few years, hoping that maybe some new clue may be unearthed. Some fossils of that long-distance friendship to reveal.
Current Mood: Nostalgic
Current Song: How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found – Radiohead
Current Book: Out of Office – Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen