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by Charlotte Batens we live in a digital world. A kind of dream world where we can join each other’s dreams and share our thoughts and inspirations. A world where the movement between here and there, and halfway across the world, is as quick as the click of a mouse. The same rules of life and death apply, evidenced by the silence that grows so loud and insistent when someone exits the dream for good, leaving behind a resonance of their existence in the remains of their digital dream, a resonance that will live into perpetuity, or until the internet goes down for the last time. But what about people like that boy I married and divorced in my girlhood days? People who have no presence in the digital world, people who can’t be searched for and found. Where will we find their eulogy? I searched for that boy the other day. I found that he didn’t exist, in the digital world except for one mention, the certificate of his death. His heart gave out, it seems. The word “found,” after the date and time of his death, hit me hard. It made me wonder if he had a life in the real world. Was he absent there too? Was there no one who knew he was on the verge of leaving, someone he could call in his final hours, someone who knew him? There’s such a quest for fame, but some people fear being seen in the digital world, of being tracked, or hacked. But if you want fame, you have to be open to all that. When you’re famous on the internet, everyone knows everything, even your darkest secrets. That boy I knew wanted to be famous. In fact, that was his big thing. He wanted to build boats as big as the sky with his name emblazoned across the front—in gold. But evidently he didn’t want to put himself out into the digital world to show off his designs, or whatever. I wonder why? If he'd been my Facebook friend, I’d know. And by now, I might have forgiven him for being who he was when we were kids. I might have discovered why I married him in the first place. To do that, I’d have to remember who I was, and I’m not sure I can get back there. I’ve come too far, learned how to live deep in the real world and deep in the digital world. I've learned how to not be afraid to reveal myself, to allow you to reveal yourself. What if that boy had learned that? What if he wasn’t so lonely? Would he be gone now? Just like that? Or would he have found friends on Facebook? New things to talk about. Funny things. Cats Dogs Kitties Flowers and squirrels Vincent Van Gogh, who he liked. Everything exists in the digital world. EVERYTHING! It’s all right here. Except you can’t taste it. And you can’t touch it. And you can't hold it in your arms and kiss it. But you can hear it, and you can see it, and you can think about it, because it’s all right here in the digital dream world of the information highway. Copyright 2022. All rights reserved.
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