You know, I've been reading things written by people on the internet for my whole life, or at least my whole life after I was about ten. I'm thirty three now. That means there are people whose words I read on the internet twenty years ago who are presumably still around and occupying the internet—sometimes using names I can recognize from back then, too. (hat tip to my fellow "changing usernames is unnatural actually" brethren; I've only changed one myself twice in the whole world since I was about fourteen or fifteen.)
Sometimes I think about a person I see around occasionally on the internet. That person wrote a story about a character in a rather silly fandom we shared, and I read it as a child just beginning to conceptualize being someone whose opinions might matter. And I remember reading that story at some point, because at that age I had a hyperfixation on that character in that fandom at that time and I read pretty much everything in the genre. I never really got to talk to anyone but the inside of my head about it. My friends didn't read fanfiction, and my parents viewed my reading fanfiction as some kind of depraved, shameful secret. Anyway, I read that story and I remember having some kind of deep realization about how adult humans work while I was reading it.
I learned something about the world from that story. (It was one of those insights that are now so molten alongside my core that it's difficult for me to disentangle them from myself, like "people outside you have their own perspective on your behaviors, but that doesn't mean they have to be right.") And I remember that they know it, because they taught it to me, without meaning to. One of the anonymous impacts on readers that writers never see unless they're extraordinarily lucky.
And I smile, because it's lovely to see them again, and they showed me a skill I still use today. We don't have a relationship of any kind—it would be very difficult to recognize me, I think—but they did me a favor a long time ago. And I remember. Now I get to be reminded that this person still exists, and is still a pretty cool human to be around today, at least for the specific circumstance of internet neighbor. Well, and our modern level of concern about once beloved elders from the distant past going terrifyingly cult-addled and bigoted on short notice.
That has not happened in the slightest. They're just still a pretty nice fandom person who is a bit older than me, who is recognizably the same person they have always been, but more intensely and thoughtfully—like a distilled brandy, not a sour vinegar left out on a countertop too long.
Weirdly, that's a thing I find comforting: this tiny, one way, invisible affection. Every so often I feel this intense affection for a person I've never spoken to or about, because I see them and I love them intensely for a moment and then we both go about our days.
Think about how many interactions you have with people as you go about your day. Wouldn't it be nice to imagine that other people feel like that about you?
I think I'm going to imagine that there's one person that read something I said and thinks that about me. I don't need to ever actually know if it's true: I can just imagine someone who happened to be at a formative moment when they learned something against the background of my words. We'll never know each other as our screennames are lost along the years and we move in and out of touch with parts of ourselves, but we still have that little fond impact on one another, those fingerprints in one another's clay.
It's a nicer world to imagine than the one where no one is paying attention to me, or the only people paying attention to me are mean. And there's really no way to ever know for sure, so why not inhabit the pleasant end of the imaginatory pool if you can?
