Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Who You Think I Am

trying to change the numbers? Yes. So it was during one of our long breaks, I just couldn’t take not knowing where Joe was any longer— because he could vanish, completely vanish— I set up a fake Facebook profile. Till then I’d hardly used it, I had a profile with my real name, Claire Millecam, it was for work, I exchanged information with foreign academics or former students, every now and then, no great shakes. Then I fell into the trap. For people like me who are terrified of being abandoned— that ’s what you’ve got written there, haven’t you, terrified of being abandoned? Basically a bit like a food allergy: too much abandonment and I’m heading for anaphylactic shock, I suffocate and die— for people like me the Internet is the shipwreck as well as the life raft: you drown in the tracking game, in the expectation, you can’t grieve for a relationship, however dead it may be, and at the same time you’re hovering above it in a virtual world, clinging to fake information that pops up all over the Web, and instead of falling apart you go online. If only for that little green light that tells you the other person’s online. Ah, that little green light, what a comfort! I remember that. Even if the other person ignores you, you know where they are: he’s there on your screen, he’s sort of grounded in time and space. Especially if next to the green light it says “Web”: then you can imagine him at home, sitting at his computer, you have a mooring in the wild sea of possibilities.

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