Blogroll Memorial

I remember going to my senior school, one of the new boys in a new boy class and watching me and everyone else size up the other faces in the room. Watch someone do something I might do, or hear an observation I might make, and smile in recognition of their echo in my mind, and nod at them, and smile, of course, and then I found a friendship born and life became community.

After that it all slowed down a bit. I became more used to being normal and combed my hair: not every day, of course because that’s too odd, but certainly when I went for interviews, or some girl might smile at me, so life went on

Now we come to Blogging, my new world, and sure enough, just by saying hello, and asking if they really were related to that insect in the photograph, I made new friends, and we visited back and forth. There was a thing called ‘Blogroll’ way back then, and we are talking well over two  years , ( can you believe it )  on which you placed your closest internet ‘family’, and got to know, emotionally, each breath they took.

But here, out in this world, we are both real and soap drama. The lives which move us are seldom ever seen, or heard or touched, but through the words and our own experiences, we feel, as echoes once again, something of the life they lead.  We live life inside out, and share emotions more than courtesies, though they exist as well, how could they not. Something of what it might be like to live as they must do, and feel how they feel, in lives which move us beyond our understanding  holds our breath as they move through some emergency,but then lives change.

Quite often, the need now passed, they cease to Blog and vanish from the room, others find fresh interests and move to other things, we cannot say but this is strange. Recently I get more comments and visits than I ever did, but, except in rare cases, none of them are from the people I first knew, whose names I recorded in my ‘Roll’ lest I forgot to visit them regularly: I still do, because I’m built like that.

I always have a mug of tea when I wake up, and peer out of the window at the sky, as if I might grow crops, and the weather might make a difference to my working day. I am a man of routine, week on week, and visiting friends is part of what I do, but in a world which seeks for understanding, and looks for echoes in another’s eyes, to touch the life of a person never seen, can seem more precious to the private mind, than all the gold lost in some unrecorded sea, and touch we might.

We learn the beauty of a truth, of moments shared, and nods across the ocean, but most of all, as day follows day, and I look at the dawn and watch the sky tell me the news, I sense, for me, there is no permanency more than the passing clouds, or wildfowl on the water making  cries to lives I watch but will never be.