Tags
boredom, creative, fiction, flash, flash fiction, friendship, internet, nostalgia, short stories, social media, stories, story, The Search, writing
It was boredom, really. Nothing more than boredom. I would like to be able to say that it was interest that had spurred me on, a natural sense of curiosity, a wave of nostalgia even; but no, in the end my actions came down to nothing more than boredom. It was boredom that found me sitting in front of my computer and boredom that, from the depths of my mind, settled upon a name; a name conjured up from a past that seemed lifetimes away.
I typed the name into the search engine, surprised at first by the volume of hits that it brought up. I settled upon a Social Media platform and opened the link. Navigating my way through the plethora of options and questions I soon found the page (or should I say pages) which showed the results of my search. Once more I was surprised by the number of people who not only shared the same name as the one which I had entered, but who had thought themselves worthy enough to enter their details onto the platform. But perhaps I am being harsh; perhaps most of those, the outline of whose details lay before me, had dipped into this world in order to track down forgotten or lost friends (or, indeed, to be re-found by them) and that the task that they had undertaken had not merely been an exercise in massaging their own ego. Of course there would be those who felt that they had a point to prove; a message to impart, but maybe this was genuinely nothing more than a way to connect, a way to reach out to those whose paths one had crossed and those for whom real, physical interaction would never be possible.
Despite the sheer volume of names that had appeared on the screen I found it almost disarmingly straightforward to find what I had been looking for. I clicked on the link and found myself on the home page. Here the brief historical details confirmed what I already knew – I had found who I had been searching for; a friend from my youth, someone with whom I’d grown up; someone with whom I had shared experiences. Someone who had understood me – and I them – until life had dragged us apart.
I began to scroll through the messages and posts that they had uploaded. Some focussed on family that I didn’t know – additions to their life which had occurred since we had lost contact. Others were reflections on their loved ones whom I could recall, their names and faces springing to life as if they were in the room with me. But most seemed distant to me, as if they had come from a place that neither of us had ever inhabited. There were images and comments which I found either disconcerting or alien to me; posts to which I had no attachment and which I couldn’t reconcile with the person that I had once known. Had they really held these opinions, these perspectives, for all these years? Had our points of view been so askew that we had never realised it; been so obscured by the desire to maintain a friendship that had such fragile foundations that we had ignored our differences? Or had I always mis-read what must have been clear to others?
It was boredom that had taken me by the hand and led me here, to this place, this point in time; and boredom that closed my eyes.