Unfollowing my dead friends
I think about this line from one of the most popular songs by my favorite band.
Even though I believe the band meant this line literally, I find myself instead thinking about friends who are somehow "dead" to me simply because we no longer communicate with each other. Not for any particular reason either.
In theory, I could have stayed "in touch" with high school friends after I moved hundreds of miles away from my hometown, following their utterly different lives from the comfort of my phone. Unsurprisingly, people drift apart after high school regardless of whether or not they use social media platforms.
But I've lost good friends in my adulthood, and I do think my departure from social media several years ago is at least partially to blame. There were never any rifts in the friendship. We just stopped talking.
If I were to return to those platforms, would I unfollow them? I don't know, probably not. Maybe I would engage in some sort of digital voyeurism. Just to see if they're okay.
I still think a lot about my "dead" friends. The ones who grew up on my street and kept me company in the seemingly endless summers of my childhood. My Tumblr friends who kept me company at shows when I was in college and lived in the same city as them. My former best friend I met in high school who decided out of the blue to stop talking to me about three years ago.
I even think about my own blog and those who have left kind messages in my guestbook. I like to think I'd be friends with each one of them. But I've noticed that a decent fraction already deleted their own blogs if they linked them in their entry. Where did they go? It's sort of like they died to me, even if only digitally.
At what point do friendships start to go rotten, to die and to never be revived? At what point do you stop "following" a "dead" friend, digitally or not?
The truth is I don't think I ever completely unfollow my dead friends, even if I've been disconnected from some of them for years. From time to time I think about them and wonder where they are in the world right now and if they're all right. Imagining how things have turned out for them.
Here is the song in case anyone is wondering.