A Little Segment of Internet Nostalgia

Back in the day – and by that I mean a year ago – I sent a lot of emails to my friend Ivy.

That had been happening since we were 12, like a routine. Sometimes, when I want to remember friendship, I look back and smile: when a crisis happened, I emailed her, usually with a long explanation. Over the past year, we’ve used messenger more to communicate, when we can’t call or see each other. Emails, though, are something I can never forget.

When I was 12, I used to email S (my now ex-boyfriend) a lot. Due to my, er, weird tendancies as a tween, he now has several horrendously embarrassing voice recordings that I sent to him. It’s become an on-going joke between us, because we both have recordings and emails that could mortify the other. Oh god, I don’t even want to think about the shit I said which I thought was cool at the time. My voice sounded like I knew everything and there’s one particularly awful one that I REFUSE to contemplate.

Now, the main group I email are bloggers. Saved in a folder far far away are some of the loveliest messages I’ve ever received from anyone, so well thought-out and beautiful to read. Whenever I get an email from one of you, it makes my day; I need to start emailing people more who I haven’t spoken to in a while.

I often find it “easier” to write an email to someone. I’m notorious for not replying to people, but with email, I can compose it spend TIME on it, without being pressured to respond just then. I can think more about what I want to write, which makes it less stressful. Because of Ivy, andother people, emails hold a special meaning to me. It’s rare now that I actually write one that’s not to teachers or bloggers, rarer even that I receive them, and whenever I do it’s nice and makes me smile.

On the Internet, in my files and folders and buried somewhere in the archives of Wattpad/Facebook/Twitter are a lot of things that I either love, despise or want to hide forever.

In addition to my voice recordings and nostalgic emails, there is:
• My various roleplay characters (I miss them)
• Various messenger conversations such as with Ash, which I just refuse to read because they’re either too uncomfortable or awful
• A horrific story I wrote when I was 7, that I typed up two years ago to keep (WHY?)
• Tweets from my 12-year-old self, more specifically the ones about the boyfriend I had then and the attention-seeking and overdramatic ones that came after that
• My ranty, three-paragraph long facebook posts from when I was 13. I was known for them, which now I think of it, is kind of bad
• My incredibly weird facebook comments and posts, plus numerous arguments I had various people (by the end of it, I enjoyed arguing and just did it for the banter)
• A video of me singing when I was 8 in my friends Poppy and Rose’s bathroom, in which I sound like a fly
• An even worse one of me attempting to do “sport”, which my dad plays to people sometimes when they come over
• Possibly the worst one of all: one of me when I was 11, talking about books. I’m not revealing any more because anonymity

Even if many of these make me cringe, or smile, I’ll always remember them with a sort of exasperated fondness. I’m looking back over Ivy’s emails and smiling because they are just so nice, and some I sent were nonsensical.

The ones from S are even funnier, as they’re just one line in an email attached to a voice recording. “Happy now?” “Shhhh” and “HEREEE” are just some of them. What was I thinking?

At some point, I’ll take a trip down memory lane, to properly show you my… Interesting internet side. For example, I have a document called “Bugger off” and “S’s shitty ramblings” and whenever I read them, I burst out laughing, like today when I was supposed to be having a free lesson.

I don’t plan on deleting any emails, or files, from when I was younger. They’re a reminder of who I was, all of the strange things I did, which make me who I am today.

Do you have anything terribly embarrassing/cute/nice on the Internet?

From Elm 🙂