Why I'm On the Internet

Nighttime is different now. There was a rush to get home before, a reason to be there. Now what's left? A dusty desk with a lonely computer. Two empty bottles of Vitamin Water, half refilled and choked with cigarette butts. Pictures of happy family members and a Yiddish word of the day calendar that hasn't been updated in weeks.

There is the internet, rousing choruses of anonymous voices with which one can drown out the voices inside. Any topic, any fetish, any interest can be met with a few clicks of a mouse. They call it Rule 34, if it's out there, someone made pornography with it. Can that substitute for real conversation? Can I mask a need for the emotional intimacy that has been stripped from me with people I don't know? People who have only ever seen my pixelated likeness and read words of mine on a screen? I can, for a while.

When there is no desire to leave my house, no reason to be out and all the reasons in the world to sit at home and rehash what a mess my life has become in two weeks time, where else should I turn? When home was a place I shared, there was a desire to be there, a longing to be comfortable and safe. Now that feeling of safety is broken, like a junkyard padlock smashed in with a hammer.

It's easy to reconcile why I'm on the internet. I should be writing for my benefit, writing for my future. Instead I am writing to an audience of strangers, throwing out one-liners like a comedian who never has to duck vegetables thrown from the audience. I relish that safety, the ability to say what I want and when I want with no repercussions beyond the occasional pang of guilt and an ever pastier complexion.

There is no rejection on the internet, no truth. And yet there is so much honesty, so much pledged from people feeling the same pain and masking it as best they can by responding to you in kind. Are internet friends real? Are they people I trust? Can I let them inside the tangled web of my mind enough for that thin veneer of glass that covers a broken heart to crack? Today, I'll say yes.