Abandoned (my)spaces.

Recently, whilst browsing the internet late at night, I came across my old bebo account. It was an unpleasant surprise, rather like opening a bag only to discover that sandwich from six months ago. I looked back into my past, I stared at my fourteen year old self’s profile with a crippling feeling of self loathing. Was I really like that? As I’ve gotten older, I looked back on my past self with endearment, I was young, but I was still mature for my age and not too much of a social mess. But here was my entire awkward teenage-hood plastered on my computer screen, and not only that, but anyone in the world could see my obsession with text speak, capital letters in the middle of words and cringe-worthy inside jokes that defined those years. I stared with a mixture of horror and surprise at the persona I had projected on the world. What’s worse is that I know that was what I was actually like.

I cautiously explored the rest of my page, and came across all the abandoned profiles of friends. Some of them I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years, and yet here remained the shadows of five years ago, fragments of their teenage selves. The conversations we had are still on the comments wall, questions unanswered. It feels unsettlingly like climbing aboard a virtual Mary Celeste, there was a similar eeriness as I browsed the profiles people had hastily left in exchange for MySpace or Facebook. I noticed all the different types of profile people had, there were the emo profiles, full of melancholy posts and icons saying things like ‘don’t try to fix me, I’m not broken’, the vanity profiles filled entirely with pictures of said person and the profiles that act as shrines to a significant other. At first I explored with interest, but I soon felt drawn to leave, maybe it was the overtiredness but it all started to feel a little eerie.

I considered briefly deleting the old profile, but I decided against it and left it as a tiny monument to the past.