Tell Me I’m Worth Something
We needed to matter to each other, but the words we typed told us only the worst about ourselves
The first person I knew online who died was younger than me. He drowned one summer, jumping from a dock, landing in a shallow spot in a lake, getting knocked unconscious, and under he went. I’d dealt with death before, my great-grandmother and a grandfather, and this boy had never been a person of particular interest to me, but when word finally trickled online, I was shocked that he — who I knew only as words on a screen — was gone.
When I say I knew him, I mean I had never met him in person because he lived in Texas. And when I say he had never been a person of particular interest to me, what I mean is we weren’t friends or anything, but we ran in the same circles on a discussion forum for webcomics and pop culture, an incubator for the type of deeply layered ironic meme-mongering that was destined to define social media. On the internet, he was only a vague presence I was aware of, a fellow participant in the endless chatter of people who all seemed to live so far away from me, people who were cooler and smarter, who had it together.
Oh, but this kid, he didn’t have it together. We didn’t interact directly, but I knew he existed in the way that in so-called real life you come to be…
