Darla

Make as many friends as you can in high school, because, never again will you have such an opportunity to spend as much time with as many people your own age, with whom you have a lot in common, high school, if nothing else, and the opportunity to form friendships with the potential to endure for decades.

When you come to the end of your life, if you have one good friend left, you are fortunate, said my father, and he might have had a point. The advent of the internet gave us all a second chance, as it were, to form friendships by the bushel. Facebook seems to have replaced chat rooms as the social venue of choice, which is understandable, since chatrooms were always so full of acrimony and goofiness; but chatrooms had their positive value, and i for one, rather miss them.

I got my first computer in 2000, and got on aol, which at the time had seventeen million members, and grew to 34 million by 2005. On aol, in the chatrooms, i met many people, all over the country, and in particular, i met darla.

Instant messaging - has it been replaced by twitter? Is twitter nothing other than instant messaging by another name, with a limit placed on number of letters?

In 2000, and on into 2001, darla and i had quite an online romance. We became online friends, but alas, i was more interested in her than she was in me. To quote Jagger, "it tells the tale of men".

She signed on to aol less and less, she drifted away from me, and i heart brokenly moved on. Finally i too lost interest in aol, drifted away from social media, and never did regain my momentum in the facebook twitter era.

A couple of times, ten yeras or so into the new millenium, i googled darla, and saw her name, but little else. then, just the other day, whimsically, i googled her again, and i came up with - her obituary.

after twelve years of wondering about her, i found out. she never married or had children, but moved to another part of the country, and presumably, like everyone else, replaced aol with facebook. In december of 2012 she died, at a relatively young age.

this brought about all sorts of emotions in me, including self pity. So you preferred death to me, huh darla. That sort of thing. What would your fate had been had you been as interested in me as i was in you? What might you and i have been together?

At least i got to sign and leave a message in the online memory book, and i saw pictures of darla, for the first time. I had never really known what she looked like. Now I know. The feelings of nostalgia and grief welled up in me, and have yet to abate. Well then, I'll see her in heaven, if she wants me to.