This is a post about grief, skip it if that will be triggering for you.
I decided that I might want to record some vlogs in my home office- it’s a really terrible space for recording video and audio. BUT it’s the space I have. So I looked at the clutter of the really cool CD shelf my partner and I purchased in the early 2000s it had very few CDs left on it, and it has become a catch all for small clutter.
As I cleared away the clutter and cleared the shelf, a very dusty handmade CD case was on the bottom of one of the less used shelves. I dusted it off and realized who had made it.
An I was hit with a wave of grief.
I’d met this guy through my wife, they’d gone to high school together and he was a cool artist. Like went to RISD and graduated and was a “real” artist. We had met in person once, but the majority of our interactions were on instagram and twitter. It was cool. I liked his pics. He liked mine. We chatted in DMs.
Then one day he disappeared from social media.
Then he came back and posted that he’d been away because he’d been in a serious accident and had needed to relearn how to walk. Then a few months later he posted that he was back in the hospital. Then my wife got word from a mutual friend that he’d passed away due to medical complications from the accident. His family posted to FB and Instagram.
And that was it.
Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about him over the last few years. He’d been someone that I really liked and had connected with online but when I saw that CD (because he was also an accomplished musician) it really hit me that he was gone. I flashed back to the conversations we’d had about art and making.
AS FB and Twitter seem to finally go the way of MySpace I am conflicted. This article gives an idea into why I’m so conflicted, but also this wave of grief is a window into why I am actually sad about FB and Twitter’s demise.