A girl I knew at school moved to another town in 1988.
I never saw her again. I don't know where she went, what
she did with her life, whether she's alive. There was no
forwarding address, no email, no profile to search. She
left on a Friday, and by Monday she had ceased to exist
in any verifiable sense. I was fifteen. This was ordinary.
Before the internet, people disappeared from your life
with a regularity that would seem pathological today.
Not dramatically — not in the way true crime podcasts
mean when they say "disappeared." Quietly. A colleague
took a job somewhere else. A friend moved. A neighbour
emigrated. A person you spoke to every day became, over
the course of a single week, permanently irretrievable.
The world absorbed them and offered nothing back.
I keep thinking about how casually we accepted this. The
finality of it. You could spend three years sitting next
to someone in a classroom, sharing jokes and minor
confidences, and then one of you would leave — and that
was it. There was no mechanism for reconnection beyond
extraordinary effort. You might try directory enquiries,
if you remembered their surname and guessed which town
they'd landed in. You might write a letter to their old
address and hope it was forwarded. More often, you did
nothing. The loss barely registered as loss. It was just
how things worked.
The infrastructure of connection was laughably thin.
Landline telephones required you to know the number, and
numbers changed when people moved. Phone books covered
local areas. Letters required a postal address. If
someone relocated and didn't tell you — and why would
they, if you were a casual friend rather than a close
one — the connection severed cleanly and permanently.
There was no search engine to type their name into. No
social graph linking mutual acquaintances. No algorithm
to reconnect you. No suggested friends. Just silence,
and eventually acceptance.
I think about a specific group of people I worked with
in 1993 at a small office in Sheffield. We shared a
space five days a week for almost a year. I remember
first names, a few surnames, fragments of personality.
One woman was saving for a house. A man was obsessed with
rally driving. Someone's mother was unwell. These details
survive in my memory with surprising clarity, but the
people themselves are gone. When the contract ended, we
dispersed. No one suggested staying in touch because
staying in touch required sustained, deliberate effort —
regular phone calls, letters, visits — and we all
understood, without saying so, that the relationship
did not warrant that level of maintenance. The threshold
for sustained contact was much higher than it is now.
This created a strange emotional texture. You accumulated
a growing catalogue of people you had genuinely known and
would never encounter again. Not estranged. Not
deliberately lost. Simply — gone. The butcher's son who
moved to Canada. The woman at the next desk who left to
have a baby. The friend from university who returned to
Malaysia. Each departure was a small, quiet severance.
You carried forward a version of them frozen at the
moment of last contact, and that version slowly degraded,
merging with invention, losing specificity until only an
impression remained.
What strikes me now is how much this resembled a kind
of low-grade grief that no one acknowledged. Researchers
at Psychology Today have described the concept of
"commemorative friends"
— people who were important to you earlier in life, with
the understanding that you might never see or hear from
them again. Before the internet, nearly everyone in your
life outside your immediate circle was a commemorative
friend in waiting. The category was so large it was
invisible. You didn't mourn each departure because there
were too many of them, and because the culture offered no
framework for treating a drifted friendship as a genuine
loss. It was simply what happened.
The asymmetry with the present is difficult to overstate.
Today I can find almost anyone. A name typed into a
search bar will surface a LinkedIn profile, a social
media account, a local news mention, an obituary. The
mystery has been eliminated so thoroughly that we've
forgotten it ever existed. But for decades, the default
condition of human relationships was impermanence
followed by permanent silence. You met people, you knew
them, they vanished, and the world closed over the gap
they left behind.
I've written before about how
pre-internet life was never designed to be archived
— how it existed as lived experience rather than data,
and how the absence of records is not a failure of
retrieval but a genuine absence. The disappearance of
people operates on the same principle. Those connections
were not documented, tracked, or preserved. They existed
in person, in proximity, in shared physical space. When
the proximity ended, the connection ended. No trace
remained in any system. The only archive was your own
memory, and memory — as I've explored in thinking about
how memories detach from their temporal anchors
— is not a reliable archive of anything.
I sometimes wonder whether those people think of me.
Whether the woman from Sheffield ever recalls the office
we shared, the specific quality of light through those
windows, the coffee machine that never worked properly.
Probably not. Or if she does, she remembers a vague
shape — a young man whose name she cannot retrieve, whose
face has blurred into a composite of several faces from
that era. This is how it goes. We were real to each other
for a period, and then we became ghosts in each other's
pasts. Not dead, not absent — just permanently
unreachable.
There was something honest about it, though I'm reluctant
to romanticise. The impermanence forced a certain
presence. You paid attention to people because you sensed,
even unconsciously, that this might be all the time you'd
get. Conversations carried more weight when you couldn't
resume them later via text message. Departures had
gravity. When someone left, you understood — really
understood — that this was probably the end, and you
conducted yourself accordingly. There were more proper
goodbyes. More deliberate last conversations. More
attention to the fact of someone's physical presence
before it was withdrawn.
My father had a friend called Roy who he'd known since
childhood. Roy moved to Australia in 1971 and they lost
contact almost immediately. For over thirty years, my
father mentioned Roy occasionally — wondering aloud what
had become of him, whether he'd married, whether he was
still alive. There was no way to find out. In 2004,
after my father had been online for a few years, he
searched for Roy's name and found him within minutes.
They exchanged emails. It was friendly but brief. The
gap was too wide. They had become different people. The
reunion answered the question but couldn't restore the
relationship. The mystery had been more sustaining than
the resolution.
I suspect that is the real loss here. Not the people
themselves — they are out there, or they aren't, living
their lives independent of my curiosity. The loss is of
a world where not-knowing was a permanent and accepted
condition. Where you could carry someone with you for
decades as an unanswered question, and the question
itself was a form of connection. The internet resolved
the questions but dissolved the carrying. Now everything
is either findable or confirmed dead. The middle state
— alive in memory, unknown in fact — has been almost
entirely eliminated.
I don't want to go back to it. But I notice its absence.
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