You probably weren't expecting to hear from me. I know it's been a while since I shared photos or posted a status update or even commented on someone's wall.
Browsing through your 'photos' and 'info' sections from the privacy of my studio apartment about 8000 miles away from where most of you live, it was nice to see that things are going so well.
I liked your vacation albums from Hawaii and California and New York, featuring shots of you and your buds making funny hand gestures in front of the Empire State Building and other landmarks. I appreciated those photos of you frolicking in the sands on rural beaches. I especially enjoyed the pictures of you lounging on the couch in your pajamas, doing absolutely nothing. It's a good idea to preserve those moments for future anthropologists. I'm totally into it.
I notice some of you have gone to grad school, gotten into and out of serious relationships, found new jobs and even shifted cities. What great news! A couple of you got married (I probably should have been on top of that, sorry. There's a gravy boat somewhere, just waiting to be shoplifted and delivered to you.) A couple of you seem to have discovered long lost family members, which is cool. Some of you still hang out with each other, which kinda surprises me.
You know what else surprises me - that so many of you haven't defriended me. Seriously, a lot of us barely know each other.
It's weird. There was a time when I gave up on surreptitiously checking your profiles. It made me sad. But now, going back, I find that I'm surprisingly cool with it. I miss some of you, others I don't. Maybe that's what happens when you live so far away - you realize exactly how little distance is worth. One of my close friends in Delhi lived the last 13 years of her life on River Road, about ten miles from my parents' house. She's two years older than I am, but until we both left those homes and came here, we never realized that we were neighbors.
There's another girl I met in New York and thought I'd never see again - until she randomly appeared at a party I was at last month.
One could say that it's because the social circle of ex-patriates in any big city is vanishingly small, and that everyone eventually sees each other. But that's not true. People pass in and out of Delhi all the time without leaving a mark. Nothing about our connections or relationships to each other is inevitable.
It's no wonder that looking at Facebook no longer makes me sad. I no longer feel like I've lost something by leaving my old life behind, because actually I haven't left anything behind.
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