March 19, 2010

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You know how your eyes squint to block a scary scene from a movie playing in front of you and your face contorts from the anticipation of what fate may befall the heroine? I lived out my own horror story yesterday when I finally got the courage to open my old YM id.

As I typed a password I vaguely remember, I was wishing I'll get it wrong but I realized that the only way I'll be prompted with an incorrect password entered is if I did it on purpose, or if my finger slipped to replace each character with a different one. The familiar logo woke up from its slumber, bouncing once to face its user, blinking, breathing, all the while not losing the smile pasted on its roundness. Then the vertical window went white/blank, longer than usual because I was on my very old poor performing laptop. When it finally showed the list of old online friends, my mouse was already on the scroll bar, dragging it downwards, towards the end, an intimate act I thought I had already buried in my messy jumbled brain. Of course it won't cooperate. For a minute the title bar showed
"(Not Responding)" and the window showed white and blank once more. But when it recovered, Yahoo! Insider opened then it popped out the thing I was dreading.

I used to imagine what that moment will be like. Really. A 100 messages at the slightest? A confined space filled with messages from the same person. A one-liner. A word. A question. A plea. A letter-long. Spills from the heart. Again, from the same person. Then sparse messages from random people. That's how I saw it when I daydream. Instead I got these: 3 text, on separate lines. 2 on
that same day and the other dated September, a harmless inquiry about my life. 1 got me brooding. It's not even a word found under 'A' in Webster's. It's an expression translated into text composed of three characters. It incited images of what happened before it was sent, what was going through the person's mind and guts, and the silence that followed. What did not sit with me was the finality. The silence that came after.

Now, I can sign into my old YM id whenever I feel like it. No worries. Plus I just discovered I have been deleted from a list. I repeat, no worries.

Post shout-out (a.k.a. senseless late reaction): I can now write and blur what used to be intimate and I will continue until I only produce one entry a year... then none.

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