my journal 10/08/2025 23:59

The Minnesota Wild season starts tomorrow. Three years ago, I met a bunch of online friends on Twitter, because we were all fans of the same hockey team. The Wild has a vibrant fanbase, made up of hundreds of accounts, and I befriended a handful of people in particular. As the years passed and high school boredom morphed into college busyness, I stopped posting, stopped checking in to see what people were saying, stopped replying to friends. But I still talk to one of them.

What do we mean to each other? Every single interaction we’ve had is online. I don’t exist to her. She doesn’t exist to me. I could’ve been a retiree with too much time on my hands, or a government experiment to test how much people are willing to trust a complete stranger. Every conversation we’ve had could be collected and compiled into a data set for study. Every joke we’ve laughed at could be retrieved with a keyword search. Our friendship is the sliding of two pairs of thumbs across two inches of a phone screen.

When we first started talking, I truly had no idea who I was speaking to. But we always laughed a lot. We typed out lyrics to songs we were showing each other in all caps. We exchanged phone numbers. We told each other about our families, our friends, our campus crushes, our worries and our hopes for the future. We learned each other’s birthdays and, in the blink of an eye, we’d celebrated three together. I texted her today after I saw an article about the Wild’s season opener. These days, we spend more and more of our conversations telling each other how grateful we are for each other, and what a miracle it was that we ever found each other.

40 years after we both finally forget to send a message, we’re going to reconvene at a Shell in Ohio which sits exactly halfway between our home addresses. We’ve both prepared ourselves to accept the reality of this final exchange because, in the end, we lead completely different lives. She is from Minnesota. I am from Boston, more than 1,500 miles away. She is in a sorority. I have never dreamed of touching Greek life. Our only outlet of connection is an iMessage contact that seems bound to slip into obscurity.

We are growing older. We will keep growing older, maybe get jobs, maybe get married to other people, maybe move even more miles farther apart. Maybe we never become real to each other. But we are friends for life. Shell will be bankrupt in 40 years.