This Star Won't Go Out

I have had a lot of online friends over the years, but in general I’ve found that it’s a lot more difficult to have personal, intimate conversations online than in person. Maybe it’s the overwhelming availability of entertaining and mindless culture to absorb, or maybe it’s just the awkward barriers of clunky keyboards and hundreds of miles. Maybe it’s just residual warnings from parents not to talk to strangers in chat rooms. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to talk about serious issues, since it’s easy to discuss such things abstractly and impersonally, but rather that it’s hard to talk seriously, with something at stake, about simple, personal, hidden details. In fact, some of these might be so mundane and obvious that it doesn’t occur that they are being withheld.

It was no exception talking to Esther for the first time online. We talked about online games, Harry Potter, and how weird some other online communities were. When I remember the first couple of months of knowing Esther, I mostly remember laughing a lot, and thinking what a fun, witty person she was. It’s strange, but after being Esther’s friend for not too long, she already felt like a little sister, albeit one who happened to be halfway across the country, and whom I’d only seen in blurry YouTube videos. We would make fun of each other’s typos; we would have passionate, late-night discussions about Harry Potter, about the latest film in the series, about how a certain scene was just perfectly rendered; we would have the most inane chats with our other friends, with the unrivaled silliness of teenagers and young adults. Being friends with Esther was just fun, and sometimes it seemed like that was all there was to it.

It wasn’t long after we became friends that I realized that there was something else about Esther that made a deep impact on her close friends. It’s hard to describe this characteristic, but I think it was ultimately a profound capacity for compassion. She would simply, once in a while, avert our attention from fart and poop jokes, and transform our chat into an intimate space to let other people in to the parts of you that you show hardly anyone. She made it a natural transition, and I think that we were all yearning for moments like this. It’s hard enough to let new people in to our unattractive, uncomfortable, shadowy inner selves in real life; online, it’s easy to have acquaintances you regularly talk to through multiple platforms, but never really open up to. The Internet doesn’t demand the same expectations of social interactions, and most of social media doesn’t have the same directness of one-on-one interactions.

As I see it, it takes a lot of bravery to break away from the silly, lighthearted chatter, and actually ask your friends to delve into the deep recesses of their lives. Esther would manage to break through the layers of ironic humor and aloofness, to get us to talk about our families, our pasts, our fears and anxieties, our faults. She made our chats seem inviting and completely non-judgmental. She gave you the impression that she’s honestly concerned about you, that she really cares about more than you than just your talent for puns. At least largely thanks to her, our group of friends went from being jokes and random nerd enthusiasm, which bears no fault in itself, to becoming a safe, comforting online space of love and compassion. Before I had met Esther, I didn’t think of the Internet as the kind of medium for friends to spill their souls out to one another. I couldn’t have imagined I would get to know online friends just as well as friends I see every day. These are the things Esther means to me: being able to care deeply and ostensibly for your friends, and being able to make yourself completely accessible and vulnerable in their presence.