Snapshot of Me at 18
By: Joe Shetina
Tags: Gay, Self, Life, Internet

Snapshot of Me at 18

Maybe it was the digital friendships we made along the way

Around two years ago, I received a text from a number I didn’t recognize. Once he told me his name, I realized he was an “Internet friend” from my early, sluttier days.

You see, kids, before OnlyFans, there was a site called Xtube. Those of us with the entrepreneurial and exhibitionist spirit could go there and post videos of a salacious and pornographic kind. Amateur Internet porn wasn’t the dregs of depravity Cyberseduction: His Secret Life made it seem. But it was a good time all the same.

This person — we’ll call him Vanya — was one of my first “fans.” He was 24 and Canadian. I liked that he lived far enough away that I could tease without the expectation of making good. We struck up the kind of flirty, noncommittal friendship that often springs up from those kinds of connections.

Vanya lived in a particularly remote part of Canada, apparently. Every time I tried to initiate a video chat with him, he’d say his Internet couldn’t handle it. But he sent pictures. And maybe they were good enough pictures to assuage my catfish fears. A cursory Internet search corroborated enough basic info to make me confident he wasn’t lying about his identity.

We talked for nearly a year. He was a graphic artist, composer, a practitioner of Tantric sex. My manic pixie dream boy. I told him I had dreams of being a writer and filmmaker. We chatted amorously and sent pictures. We updated each other on our lives. We had deep conversations about consciousness. Soon, I went away to college and we lost touch.

Vanya sticks in my mind because he was the first person who seemed as interested in me as he was in my body. At least, he was the first one to make it known. More than that, Vanya was the first person who pursued me in that way whom I found almost unbelievably attractive. I was still working on body image issues. That period helped me through it, but there was still a lot to unlearn about what I thought I deserved.

When Vanya texted me again in 2018, he had relocated to Los Angeles. “I was hoping you’d be here by now,” he told me.

In the intervening six years, so much had changed. He had no way of knowing what had happened to my goals and life since then; the pivots and adjustments I had to make to my dreams; the realizations of adulthood — whether I had accepted them yet or not.

In updating one another, I realized that, as a twenty-five-year-old, I was closer to who I wanted to be at eighteen than I had ever been. The six preceding years (2012-ish to 2018) became the story of how I got there. Working backward to his vision of who I am/was allowed me to consider the road I’d traveled.

This pandemic has had us all relying on digital means to keep in touch with each other. It’s not perfect and it often seems impersonal, even hopelessly transient. We can’t always feel the other person there. Yet as alienating and elusive as digital relationships can be, they can also be opportunities to recall and reflect on where we were, where we are, and where we’re going. An old friend’s snapshot may tell you things a person who was there to watch the whole process may not be able.

Also, Vanya, if you’re somehow reading this, text me. I lost your number.