There seems to be an explosion in Facebook use amongst people from my hometown. I imagine that this isolated explosion probably reflects a broader explosion in the use of Facebook, but I won’t make the mistake of assuming that what people that I know personally are doing is what people everywhere are doing.

I have not yet been able to bring myself to join Facebook, however, Jen’s sister created an account for her, and I have been logging into her account and “spying” on people, although I am not just spying, I did e-mail back and forth with my closest friend from highschool, whom I have not spoken to since we graduated, except a bit at our ten year reunion.

I think Facebook is very odd, but oddly appealing at the same time. I like the idea of seeing what people that I used to care about (and in a sort of nostalgic way still do care about) are up to, but I also think it is very weird to become “friends” with people that I hardly knew, rarely spoke to, and/or would not likely ever seek out in other circumstances. Of course, the whole “friend” thing is merely semantic; the use of the word itself in Facebook is totally arbitrary. The Facebook people were just sitting around needing a word to symbolize the act of connecting with a person on Facebook and after some discussion, they decided on “friend.” But, “friend” is such a culturally and emotionally loaded word, especially within the context of high school relationships, which seem to be one major source of one’s Facebook “friends.”

One of my favorite things to do on Facebook is “friend surf.” Without actively becoming someone’s friend, the only thing about them that you can look into is who they are themselves friends with, so I look through people’s lists of friends. Invariably, I will encounter a name and/or a face (profile pictures seem to either be of people’s children or themselves) that I probably never would have thought of perhaps ever again without some active reminder. Sometimes I am indifferent to the person who has suddenly reappeared, bringing up all sorts of dusty memories, but sometimes, especially when that person was someone that I cared about, I am really thrilled to have been reminded that this vanished person has continued to exist, and has lived as many or more lifetimes as I have and is perhaps both the same and a very different person. Whenever I encounter those people, I surf their friends list. And so I bounce from face to face, imagining all sorts of lives for them.

Of course, I could just create an account, ask to become their friend, and then find out exactly what lives they have lived, but this would destroy much of the romance of the experience because, as we have all undoubtedly discovered, life is pretty boring, even when it isn’t. I used to be very frustrated by how boring life is. I was enamored with Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison and Arthur Rimbaud and Henry Miller  and Charles Bukowski exactly because their lives weren’t boring (of course, they were, and not only boring but tortured), but in my early twenties, when I was really struggling, I went for a walk with my grandfather in the woods at the back of my grandparent’s property and just after he had told me about his amazement one day when he had been walking back there and saw flames shooting out of the top of a single dead tree, he told me that I was too impatient, that life would eventually just come. At the time, I thought he meant that the exciting life I wanted to come would come. But that is not what he meant. He meant exactly what he had said, that life would just come, that one day I would wake up and realize that I was living the life I was living, and I would be happy with that life, objectively boring or no. He was right, of course. He died a few years later, just as I was waking to his promise.

One time, when I was back studying at the University of Pennsylvania after having quit for a few years, I was approached by a young woman in the library. “Bob, Bob Comis, is that you?” She asked. I looked up from my book and looked over her face. She had a prominent scar on her chin, and the scar was meaningful to me. It tugged at me. It was familiar, very familiar. I knew every contour of that scar. I knew that I had looked at that scar countless times, and yet the rest of her face was silent, it said nothing to me. She was a complete stranger. “It’s me, so and so,” she said, with the air of a person that was certain they would be known by someone they had known well. But, she was not. Her name was as empty as her face. “I’m sorry,” I said with some embarassment. She stared at me for a moment in disbelief. Is he being serious?, I imagine she wondered. Is he joking around? Could he really not remember me? Undaunted, she explained who she was, who our group of friends was, where we hung out, how often we hung out. She explained that she was back at the university pursuing a graduate degree after graduating a couple of years earlier. I had started to act as if I remembered her, even though I didn’t. I stared at the scar on her chin, frustrated that I knew it so well, annoyed that it was all that I knew. After a couple of minutes, she said goodbye and left, the whole experience having been a bit awkward for us both.

Later, after I had left the library and was walking toward the bus, she flooded back into me. She overwhelmed me. She had been, literally, one of my closest friends during my few semesters at Penn. I had actually had a huge, silent crush on her. How was it possible that I had forgotten her so completely? How was it possible that the hundreds of hours that we had spent together had been erased, if only temporarily, from my memory? How was it possible to forget so completely someone so close? I wanted to run back to the library and tell her that I remembered her, that I remembered that I had cared deeply about her, that she had been there for me during some very difficult nights, that she had been my dear friend, that we had had great times together, but it was too late.

I have felt about many of the faces and names I have come across on Facebook as I felt when I encountered that old friend. The memories are gone. I know I knew them. I know they meant something to me, but I just can’t get back far enough to reach them. I stare at their names and their faces and am haunted by ghosts with no history, and then later the history comes rushing back to me.

It is an odd and oddly appealing thing to spend time with these ghosts.