My (almost) friend,
It feels different to write you a letter even though (as of yet) our communication still stems solely from our fingertips.
But there is something wonderful about communicating here, inside the wide umbrella of Internet. I always imagine it like Santa's workshop within a large clockwork factory-- as soon as I hear that satisfying click, my words are off! Speeding through the frantic underworld at megabytes per second, narrowly missing tiny elves and eluding the occasional gremlin in the works.
You are so far removed from everything around me, it's easy to imagine a labyrinthine complex between us. And so each time I receive more from you it means our words have found a way to exist and to survive our combative worlds. Basically it means you haven't forgotten me for the spoils and triumphs of the dreaded 'IRL'.
And more than that, it is glorious. We sit atop computer chairs of gold and memory foam and declare ourselves. Our size is whatever we imagine, we are entities solely made up of words.
I will choose to be a microcosm.
A sub-genre of obscurity on the fringe of your cognizance.
And I will choose to be no size at all.
So that I may infiltrate you at any level and no physical boundary may preclude me.
And I will choose to be all-encompassing.
Bigger than your whole imagination, so I can swallow you whole and fill you up until my own words trickle out of your indents.
Until your spacebar is my heartbeat.
I like the idea that a turn of phrase can be a turn of hip, or cheek, or some abstract polygon of anti-flesh. That I can build myself into a sea of letters that still somehow carries what, and (if it can be answered) who I am in essence.
When I cease to be this virtual claim, and regain my status as a flesh-and-blood girl again, I hope that you still like it. Still like me.
Are we the same? Which will my screenname evoke?
Names are a different kind of word.
When people say "who are you?" you say it, instinctively.
And maybe it represents all you are, but maybe it's simply a collection of letters with a vaguely pleasing sound that someone thought up once while drunk on life and high on the power of word creation...
Mine means more than words to me, is more than even they are capable of. And the only way to make you see that same inherent worth is to use all of my words (all the silent ones too), until you know who I am.
Until you know the most important word in my life.
I know that there can never be just one-- words only flow when they collide.
And that is part of the wonderfulness, that something can exist with so much potential but realize none of it without another. It's gorgeous and cheesy and speaks to my insides.
For now I am glad to know the you made of words, and fascinated by the process of learning more. I will continue to revisit the common clichés of meme, and link you to weather.com until something real falls through the cracks of this crazy-beautiful phenomenon--
Internet friends indeed.
Yours, Truly.
