Online friends are kind of my thing.
It’s 2008. I’m painstakingly combing through my neon splatter paint MySpace theme code to find the bug that's breaking the background. I glance at my friends list, full of people who’ve added me and I’ve added back simply on the basis of a hit song auto-playing on their lookup or an Invader Zim display photo.
It’s 2011. I come home from high school and boot up my gigantic purple HP laptop, sitting on my carpeted bedroom floor. I open up a penpal website, where I’ve created a detailed profile listing my interests, music I like, places I’d like to travel, and what kind of penpals I’m looking for (girls my age with cute profiles and similar tastes). I shoot off some messages, add some girls on Skype, and set my status to “online.”
It’s 2017. I’m living in Japan. I’m on Discord all the time, hopping into voice chat whenever I have a free minute. It’s then that I meet my now-husband, a mysterious and casual friend back then, and suddenly I have more friends scattered across the world than I do in my own backyard.
It’s 2020, and before the big pandemic that will see us all inside for months on end, I suggest the idea of a big Valentine’s Day meetup in Paris for a bunch of internet friends so we can all finally meet each other. Eleven people from all different countries show up, including that mysterious friend from 2017. We hit it off immediately, and within a few years, we’ll be married.
Writing this in 2026, I just recently came back from a trip to California to see a friend I met on a Naruto-based Discord server. We met up for the first time last summer, and I never got around to making a post about what that trip was like. In the spirit of re-telling that adventure, I thought adding some commentary about online friendships would be fitting here.
There is something so deeply authentic about the creation of online friendships. The early internet days really were a kind of 'Wild West' of self-expression, full of niche communities and very in-group mentalities made up of people sharing vulnerable sides of themselves through social media profiles and forums.
I think that’s part of why I’ve been able to make such deep and lasting friendships with people from all over the world. The profiles people created back then were built from the core of their personalities, interests, insecurities, humor, fandoms, and dreams: things that might never even come up in everyday conversation with the people you see at work or school.
The internet also bridged gaps that normally would have stopped certain friendships from ever happening in the first place. I have friends who are twenty years older than me, friends who live in tiny rural towns, friends from countries I had barely even a concept of as a child. Without the internet, our paths never would have crossed, and I never would have gotten to know who they really were.
That's how we arrive at Asriah.
Asriah and I clicked through the Naruto fandom a few summers ago, and one classic trait of having an online friend is constantly hypothesizing about what you would do if you ever visited each other. So, when I saw a flight to Sacramento for the low price of $350, that hypothesis suddenly felt incredibly attainable. Asriah was sweet enough to offer to let me stay at her place, slashing my out-of-pocket costs and locking us into an affordable, fun summer girls' trip. It may be hard to conceptualize flying across the country to visit someone you've never met in person, but it's become a real trend in my life!
I had the most incredible time in Sacramento, bonding with Asriah and her two tweens, who were on summer break. As soon as my luggage was tucked away, I set out to create chaos: somehow getting my hands on a box of red hair dye and putting it in Asriah's and her daughters' hair within the first few days of the trip.
Clad in a pair of borrowed pajamas, we sat outside in the California sun as I angled their heads every which way, smearing blood-red box dye everywhere and giggling the whole time.
We cooked together, watched countless movies (or rather, we watched KPop Demon Hunters countless times), and stayed up late playing Uno and planning which sweet treats we were going to devour the next day. I tried my first Crumbl cookie and hated how gloopy and sugary it was, but somehow found myself sneaking little bites from the box on the kitchen counter throughout the week.
I'm not proud of it. I got caught...
We visited a small but beautiful community rose garden in Elk Grove and decided to do an impromptu photoshoot with Asriah's youngest. It felt like the Queen's rose garden from Alice in Wonderland!
Asriah and I explored the heart of Sacramento together on a bright and beautiful Saturday, with little planned other than our morning coffees and what pastries we'd want at the Middle Eastern bakery. If you're looking for high quality pastries and a delicious mango matcha in Sacramento, I highly recommend SANA'A CAFE. We walked until our watches buzzed and showed a closed circle, twisting our phones left and right as we followed GPS instructions and fought gravity while walking up Sacramento's iconic hills.
Asriah's husband earned the "Husband of the Year" award by booking us a five-star hotel for the night while we visited the city center. We immediately let the fame and fortune go to our heads, our suitcases trailing behind us as we concocted increasingly elaborate backstories in case anyone at reception asked about the purpose of our stay. I briefly considered putting on an accent, but I wasn't confident that I would remember to commit to the bit.
I used my masterful powers of persuasion to convince Asriah to go clubbing with me, something she hadn't done in over a decade, and we had the best time. At one point during the night, a man approached her, clearly intending to chat her up, and Asriah gave him this vacant stare as though he were made of glass, not even realizing he was trying to get her number. He must have said something to catch her attention because she suddenly snapped to and said, "Huh? Me?". We burst into laughter.
No trip of mine is ever complete without a visit to a local vintage store, and Sacramento did not disappoint. We walked (hiked?) uphill to Missing Audrey Vintage, which was packed with true vintage gems that were reasonably priced.
Since my time living in Paris, I've developed a mild obsession with tracking down vintage copies of Playboy from the 1950s and 1960s after stumbling across an issue on a couch at the now-closed Sous les pavés, le vintage shop. Flipping through the pages back then, I was pleasantly surprised by how fresh and engaging the articles felt, touching on the economic issues of the day and giving voice to the perspectives of the then-modern man. Missing Audrey had a gold-mine of mint-condition 60s issues, so I picked up 3 of them.
As I mentioned before, having internet friends is literally what led me to meeting my now-husband. We talk about it often; how there were a million-and-one chances against us ever crossing paths. He’s from a small town in the south of France, and I’m from New York, but we bonded over some very baseline shared interests and slowly formed this long-distance, cross-cultural friendship that eventually bloomed into something much bigger. That's the beauty of meeting someone online, you never know who you'll encounter and what your relationship can blossom into.
The internet has changed a lot since I first made my AIM profile as an angsty pre-teen. Before, it was like a curated pod of interests and fanatics, but now it feels much more like one giant pond with far too many fish. But I’m grateful I grew up online when I did, in a time that encouraged people to be unapologetically themselves and connect with others doing the exact same thing.
It's how I met so many amazing people, Asriah included. Someone who was previously just a static profile picture on my phone now keeps an extra toothbrush for me in California. How cool is that? :)
0 Comments
Post a Comment