A Conversation with Elizabeth
2014
Facebook Friend Request

It had been four years since our last exchange. I think the talk about getting back together put a shock in our correspondence. That and I was very busy. I left AOL in 2011 for a new job at the computer hosting company Carpathia, had a couple of short-term relationships which were not very satisfying, and my involvement with yoga increasing.  I thought of Elizabeth off and on, usually and the end of the year as I always seemed to do but didn’t contact her. She occasionally posted on Facebook but then she unfriended me which surprised me so I sent her a new friend request and then a few weeks later received the following email.

From:          Elizabeth 
To:            Larry
Sent:          Monday, May 26, 2014 10:14 PM
Subject:       Facebook Friend Request
 
Hello Larry,
 
Some weeks back I decided to stop using Facebook to follow many of the people on my friends list so I drastically pruned it. 
 
I had never added friends just to add them, and had a rule to never friend co-workers or students I taught, so I really had a very small list.  Even so many folks were people I had never really had  a relationship with anyway--they had just gotten added at some point without me thinking about it--your sister for example or a friend of another friend who I really didn't know! 
 
For the most part the only people I kept as FB friends were just a few out of state people that I currently or primarily stay in touch with in ways other than FB, for example through email, texting, or occasional postcards or phone calls.   FB is just a supplement.  
 
In terms of MS, I'm an active participant in a large FB group called "Its Not Easy Leaning Left in Mississippi," and I don't actually friend the people on the group, even though we communicate back and forth a great deal.
 
As for your new friend request, I didn't keep you, and a few others, as friends in FB, because FB seemed to be the only form of relationship (if you can call it that) that we presently had, or the only form we've had for some years now.
 
The past does create bonds of a sort, but without being renewed or refreshed, the past stays the past, receding evermore with time.  I still think of you fondly, or perhaps with nostalgia (as one does as one gets older), but FB really creates or maintains a very false sense of connectedness, or it makes us voyeurs peeking through windows at lives we are not truly part of!
 
I think I conservatively, or cautiously perhaps, tried to renew or refresh our relationship in the recent past, and when I check I see that was FOUR years ago--but the time flew by as I was very busy teaching.
 
What precipitated the FB pruning to begin with was asking myself, "How, or in what ways am I REALLY connected to these people in the present other than FB?"
 
Elizabeth

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