Message in a Bottle
There are a lot of personal mythologies you can hold. One of mine is that once, a long time ago, I thought that I loved someone whose real name I didn’t actually know. The internet made it happen, of course.
For the internet has always been crucial in the shaping of my own experience of intimacy. The sound of dial-up tones recalls an excitement that’s closer to queasiness. I spoke for hours with strangers, friends of friends. Is anybody out there? Anybody could be out there. Something or someone to change your life could be waiting, pixels, static air.
When I was thirteen, a boy older than me said over MSN that he was going to ask me to dance at the school disco, and I was so scared at the idea of online translating to real life that I hid in the bathroom all night. The boy apologised the next day as we chatted online as usual, and burned me a CD that I still own. He passed it to his friend to give to me, knowing I would bolt if I saw him in real life again, a fear that at the time I couldn’t understand but which now I do.
There came a lonely time, ten years later — a blistering, self-destructive summer, a time where I was a drifting ghost ship — when I spent a lot of time browsing the personals section of one particular site. A time pre-Tinder. Nervous energy sparked off me. I looked and looked and looked, messages veering from shameless to lonely even within a sentence.
Is anybody out there, I asked again, wine-drunk. I posted my message in a bottle, to see what would happen. To see if there was someone who wanted me. Within seconds, the emails started flooding my inbox. What have I done?
Did the internet ameliorate my loneliness or worsen it, during those teen years and beyond? Did it affect the way I process intimacy to this day; the fear that to be real is to be too real, that there is a comfort in being groundless, without context? For the more that you give of yourself the more you are known, which also increases the likelihood you will be found out as a disappointment?
Maybe it would have been better for my personal development to be held more accountable. To invest more in my offline intimacies, instead of garlanding the blank space of my online ones, pulling close then running away.
I am better on paper, I wrote to the person whose name I did not know. I am only good the first time you meet me, or the tenth. It felt as bracing to admit this to a stranger as it did to admit other things that I had told nobody else.
I find it useful to catalogue intimacies, to sort, to try to make sense of the ways you can care for people. So for the person whose name I didn’t know, I have filed it under intimacy of selective honesty. You can tell a stranger anything, and I did. It would be possible to say that he knew me better than anyone else ever has, and equally possible to say that he did not know me at all.
Following the dissolution of our relationship, I wrote many meandering things about knowing someone and not-knowing. They were embarrassing and are now all lost, stuck on a laptop that no longer turns on. On the webcam of this laptop I took photos of myself for him, also lost, all of it pleasingly transitory. It’s gone. Let it go.
Another cataloguing: amnesiac intimacy. One centred entirely on the moments taking place. There was a clean singularity to it. It existed on a screen, words sent through the ether, and then it existed in a handful of afternoons, that summer where London felt like it was melting and empty, and then it didn’t exist at all, and there remains nothing to prove that it did.
I do remember it all, though, so maybe amnesiac is not the right term. Maybe lightning bolt intimacy. It is there, and in the moment that it hits, the moment before it burns out, it is as real and as bright and as undeniable as anything else, anything more objectively real.
In the photos, I never showed my face. But I did use my real name. Truthfully, it didn’t occur to me not to. Truthfully, it didn’t occur to me that his name wasn’t real either, even though Google brought nothing useful back to me. I just thought some people lived offline, the way I lived mostly on.
You were the golden age of that website, the person whose name I didn’t know wrote to me later on, when we were no longer seeing each other. It’s not so much a compliment as a reflection on my internet fluency, my skill at performing intimacy in a vacuum. The thing about that though, is that it’s easy. It’s the follow-through that’s hard.
My boyfriend first contacted me online. I ignored the message but then we met anyway, several months later, in a seaside town. It remains the best coincidence of my life. It remains a talisman I hold up; that words on a screen can sometimes fall to ash compared to the reality of voice and touch.
That is the intimacy of laundry, of shared homes, of connected lives. An intimacy that, should it shatter, would pull up the ground of our lives around it. Maybe I should catalogue this intimacy as mundane or as genuine but really I just want to catalogue it as terrifying.
So you can catalogue intimacy, but I don’t believe you can rank it. There are a million ways to be close to a person, each one with their own miracles. That you can be after total annihilation of the self, but what you get is tenderness refracted back at you, is one. That you can fill up the blank space around a person you don’t know, make them real with your own voracious need, is another.
I know the person’s name now. Sometimes I would rather I didn’t. I preferred not-knowing, the unreality of drifting around the too-hot city, bringing something into being that had started with a blank space, the gap of a breath. The promise of an empty email, the cursor resting on the page, a person on the other end who could have been anyone, willing to do anything.
Everything we felt for each other stops with us. There is no burden of proof. There is nothing to tie what we had to the ground. The last miracle. I am grateful to it.
But sometimes I think I see this person whose name I didn’t know in a shopping centre, or on a train, or in a restaurant. When this used to happen, years ago, my breath would stop. I had the apocalyptic sense of the real world and this secret one colliding.
Now, when it happens, just the echo of an adrenaline spike. I try and get to a safe distance away and look, to check. I would know them anywhere, still, or I think I would.
It is never them, of course. I watch someone else’s dark head turn to me, expectantly, as if they are waiting too; my heart subsides. And then I walk away, and I do not look back.
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Sophie Mackintosh won the 2016 White Review short-story prize and the 2016 Virago/Stylist short-story competition. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta and TANK magazine, among others. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, will be published by Hamish Hamilton on 24th May 2018.