I had planned that this week’s blogpost would be illustrated with analog images from a recent photowalk in Malmö with the IgersMalmoe group, but last week I found out via Facebook that one of my longest online friends had passed away, so I’ll postpone that idea into the future. I just don’t have the urge to write a whole lot of words on photos I haven’t had the urge to edit.
My friend and I became friends on in an old Yahoo chatroom (back when Yahoo was actually worth something) and we discovered that we were in fact “twins”, i.e. born on the exact same day. We joked that we needed to find out who was the older one, but now we’ll never get the chance. Given the time zone difference it was probably me, but in the end it doesn’t really matter anymore.
It’s a strange thing when you lose someone who you “only” know online. There is no wake you can go to, no funeral where you go to to get some some sort of closure (I don’t like that word…as if mourning just magically stops with that). Instead I sit here in front of my computer and everything around you still looks the same, all the same websites still upload content at the same rate they’ve done before and your other friends share stuff in their life. Yet there’s a hole where my friend should be, where her posts should be.
I guess it affected me for another reason too. She and I are the exact same age…and I definitely think this age is too early to go. I plan on sticking around for a long time, as I am sure she did! I originally wrote that sentence as “we" plan on sticking around…it’s still weird to write that in singular form…there’s no longer any “we” in this friendship.
The online friendship thing and how her passing affects me…it’s very different from last year when an “In Real Life” friend also passed away way too early and I attended her funeral with many of her friends there. While it was an absolutely awful experience it did have a certain transitional effect; where once the funeral ceremony in the church was over and the tears had dried up somewhat we could even smile when we reminisced about our friend’s funny jokes and razor sharp wits.
I wrote above about how “closure” is a strange word in this context, but I guess if you look at it as a gradual process rather than a tipping point before and after a certain moment I can accept the meaning. I hope that this time it will be the same, where eventually the good memories will overrule the sadness.
The watery images in this post are from a photo outing I made to Lake Ringsjön earlier this year, and the flower photo is from a photowalk in central Malmö, also earlier this year. Next blogpost will be a more cheerful one…with more recent photos…I hope.