The friendship list: A story from the early internet

For years I've told my friends I daydream about collecting stories from them about their wackiest, most TMI stories from the internet of our youth, and turning them into a coffee table book to keep as a relic of simpler times. Some of our most hysterical conversations have centered these very stories and the websites we used to traverse to one day tell them. There's something comforting about the chaos of those experiences, even if some were mildly traumatic. There's something worth memorializing.

As many creatives do, I had the recent realization that if I want to see this project through, I can't keep daydreaming about it, and I can't keep it at the center of conversation alone, as enjoyable as it is to talk about. I simply have to start.

So, without further ado, The Wayback Diaries is a collection of stories and essays from early internet users - a love letter to the era of the dial-up sound, AIM emoticons, Facebook statuses, chat rooms, and maybe accidentally downloading seventeen viruses while trying to get songs from LimeWire. This is a coffee-table book meant to be passed around, read aloud, and laughed at with friends who were there for the era, too.

If you'd like to contribute a story to The Wayback Diaries, fill out this Google Form to get started. For now, here's my entry:

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In fourth grade, my mom changed jobs. She had been working for a lawyer's firm from her office in the basement; it was a disastrous room. Whenever I was bored I would sit behind her among the bookshelves and stacked boxes full of papers, full of who-knows-what, and pretend to organize without bothering her. I don't think she minded me being in there, but I minded not being able to use the family computer. I may as well have been stalking until she clocked out for the evening. Then, and only then, was it all mine.

But she was tired of being confined to that office, of being too busy to spend time with me and my little brother. So she took a huge pay cut to become a public school bus driver, as it worked better with our schedule.

There was one minor hiccup to that plan, though, and it was that she wouldn't be home to get us off our own bus anymore. So for as long as she held that job, only about a year, my brother and I rerouted to our grandparents' house a few miles away. We'd stay with them every weeknight until dinner.

I had a very specific ritual for that year: Grandma always had Tollhouse butter crackers and Campbell's chicken noodle soup in the pantry, and right when we'd step into the mudroom, we'd hug and she'd eagerly ask me if I was hungry. She'd give me the can and remind me how long to microwave it for. I'd snatch a sleeve of the crackers, balancing both delicacies in my hands, and slink off to the basement without much more interaction. I don't even remember where my brother would run off to, but it didn't matter at all. It was computer time.

Perhaps sadly, the thing I remember most fondly about spending the evenings at their house was the unfettered and largely uninterrupted internet access. No one else ever seemed to use that computer, and no one ever nagged me for how much time I spent on it. It was all mine at their house - the internet itself felt like it belonged to me. And I would happily waste those hours away on Yahoo! Music (watching music videos before I knew about YouTube), I Can Haz Cheeseburger, PostSecret, and the like. Sometimes I'd fantasize about being the next iCarly, so I'd record myself ranting about my day while testing all the video filters. I kept them in a file called "Time Capsule," imagining that one day, decades later, someone with a special interest in girlhood of the late 2000's would find it and revel in their discovery.

But Yahoo! was always my hub - it's where I created my first email address, and back then, the homepage acted as a portal to all the things an internet user could possibly want to browse: celebrity news and scientific advancements right in the center, and to the left, an alphabetical tab of every Yahoo! extension. Answers was always my favorite - a forum for strangers to ask quite literally anything to fellow strangers. I spent a fair amount of time customizing my Yahoo! Blog, too. But this particular day landed me in my inbox, its own portal entry to the right on that homepage. 

I didn't know what a Word document was, yet. Looking back, that would have been the much more appropriate space to fulfill the duty I had in mind to complete that day. But at the time, the only space that made sense to write in was the message box of an email.

My plan was this: I needed to have a version of my compiled list of friends that didn't only exist in my head; it had to be written down somewhere. It was to be for my eyes only, a place to come back to and update as I deemed necessary. It was to have four tiers: Best Friends, Friends, Frienemies, and Enemies. Boys were part of the equation, too. Chris, Helen, Angela, and Brianna were my Best Friends, of course. Allie, Wesley, Austin, and the twins Abby and Hannah were just regular Friends. Emily was iffy - a Best Friend, or a Frienemy? She was being weird about inviting me to sleepovers, lately. Maddy and Amanda? Definitely Enemies.

Before I began typing it out, I had to think of a neutral source to add to the recipient tab. It wasn't for them to see, of course, it was just the only way I understood emails to work. If there wasn't a recipient, there could be no saving the email. No documentation.

So I decided on Cameron. We drew comics together at lunch and made ourselves the characters of them. At recess we'd play as those characters. He was a safe person, a kind-hearted person, but not a particularly close person. And of course, he was never going to see this. It was going to live in my drafts forever, only with his name on it for permanency.

The list began to form. I indented the tiers properly, color-coded for each of their symbolic meanings. I spent painstaking hours of that evening making sure it was perfect. Everyone's first and last names included, capitalized, ordered just how I wanted them. And then...done! My mind eased instantly having completed the long-awaited task - no longer something that had to live up there, but had a home waiting for it in writing.

Then I hit send.

My hands twitched and froze over the keyboard. I stared through the screen, feeling a heat rise quickly from my chest, replacing that momentary ease with monumental panic. I started to sweat, my heart tripping over itself. 

Cameron could not see this list. He would never speak to me again. Would he be more hurt or offended at seeing that he wasn't even included? Would he go so far as to tell people at school what I'd done? Then no one would ever speak to me. My mom would never let me back on the computer, and she'd tell Grandma not to let me either. I'd be too embarrassed to show my face. I may have just ruined my whole entire life.

Before I would allow it all to really settle in, before I began to cry, I had to figure out a solution. 

There was no way to unsend an email; I knew this. There was also no way to guarantee that Cameron wouldn't read it, but at least in this moment I relented in knowing he was the ideal person to make this mistake with. He was earnest and innocent and always well-meaning. If I could trust anyone, I could trust him.

I began another message with his name in the recipient tab. I titled it in all-caps (bolded, underlined, and colored red if I could have): PLEASE DON'T OPEN THAT EMAIL!!!!!!!!!

"Cameron, I'm so sorry, I sent that earlier message to you by mistake and it has some really secret stuff in it. Please please please, I'm begging you, don't read it and just delete it. And please let me know when you see this. I'm so sorry!!!!!! 😢😢😢"

I don't know how long I waited. The way I remember it now, it couldn't have been longer than 10 minutes. But I also don't remember what I did in the meantime, so maybe there's a lapse in my memory. In any case, soon after I proverbially begged on my hands and knees in the form of a text box, I refreshed my inbox to a response. It read, simply, "It has been deleted 🙂"

Retelling this narrowly-avoided scandal in adulthood, most of my friends laugh at the end, not as optimistic as me. "Oh you know he read it and lied," many have said. I'll never know for sure, but I have my doubts. Cameron moved to the UK only a year or so after that happened, but in the sunsetting of our friendship, he never treated me differently. He never gave the slightest indication of knowing I had the capacity for cruel pettiness.

Cameron, if you're out there somewhere reading this: I just wanted you to know I always considered you a Best Friend. I'm sorry it took me this long to put it in writing.

As for the lesson I was supposed to have learned that day: keep secret things secret, especially online - I'd love to be able to report that it stuck. It did not. The friendship list was only the beginning of a lifelong and largely unhinged commitment to digital self-documentation. The Yahoo! Blog gave way to a Tumblr, which gave way to the notes apps and private Instagrams and Word Docs I have long since lost the passwords to. Somewhere out there in the digital ether is every version of me I have ever been, carefully recorded and occasionally shared with the wrong people. I'd be more embarrassed about it, but you're reading a blog post about it now. So I think I can live with it.