(diaryland) May 03, 2013 - 4:04 p.m.

Imaginary Friend: March

I'll never find you again. There's no way. At least, not the way I used to. You won't be able to find me again, either. I can't remember the password to my 1990s email account.

[email protected]

Don't know why you contacted me. The way you went about it, frankly, was mildly irritating.

"R U cool?"

I responded. "yep."

Two weeks later, we were avatars in the same room, shouting over everyone else. I was myself. You were a purple octopus.

What was the name of that graphic chat room place?

I basically can't remember anything you ever said to me. But we spent the whole summer of 1997 in that room.

The chat room we always went to kind of looked like the foyer of a cathedral, and there were always at least a dozen other presences there, all with their names printed underneath. In real life, I was in my pyjamas, sweating with matted hair, listening to shithouse metal, and voluntarily immobile.

There was one moment when I worried you were someone I knew. And maybe that you were trying to extract information out of me for something: I didn't know. But I asked you a question, and you answered something that proved we weren't connected, and you went back to being as inexplicable as ever.

In February, I started doing my homework. You didn't seem to give a flying fuck. I guess you just emailed someone else.

But at the very end of a short string of unanswered emails you sent to me, you sent a link to the website of a guy in the US Senate.

This is the only thing you did that keeps you hooked into the edge of my psyche.