Friends in Far Places
meditation on online friends & models of friendship
I. Chance
The day I first met Garrett and Aidan and, as it were, the first time I had met any online friend in real life, I was in San Francisco on a family vacation. I more or less snuck out, concealing the real reason why I was taking the Caltrain from SF to Palo Alto. I forget what I said. That I was meeting up with friends from freshman year who now live here, maybe, which wouldn’t technically have been a lie. As I felt the bump of the train window against my head I thought of what she might say.
My mom was skeptical of the idea that it’s good to have many friends. Instead, careful curation was required. She once explained to me, on a walk in the woods one afternoon after I fell out with a friend, that a person’s relationships consisted of four concentric circles: Arranged from small to big, in the first was family, in the second was lifelong friends, the third had “close friends” whose exact definition I failed to extract from her, and finally there were satellite friends—people who, like satellites with a highly elliptical orbits, would fly close to you every once in a while before sling-shotting off for another couple of years. Her model also prescribed an optimal range to the number of relationships within each region. Two or three lifelong friends was enough. Five to eight close friends, but definitely less than ten. A couple dozen satellite friends perhaps. And as many acquaintances as was manageable.
Manageable. I turned that word over in my head, which was beginning to hurt from the window. There was a certain coolness, a certain exacting precision to it, which might explain why I ultimately ended up not giving her model much weight at all. She was a manager, after all, and managing people was her job.
A year earlier, when we were all freshmen in high school, I’d met Garrett playing the hottest FPS game at the time, Apex Legends. Each game you matched with two others in a “party”, and each party came with a voice chat. It was usually advisable to form parties in advance instead of getting “randos” who may or may not sabotage your team’s performance.
Looking back, I had been drawn to his voice. Young though we all were, something about his voice projected the youthful optimism that I thought only belonged to American children in movies. Our party did very well in the games we played.
Later, I joined a Discord server with some people from Garrett’s school. The server was for Minecraft, I think. Or maybe some other game. I was in probably at least fifty servers by that point, and I find it hard these days to separate their memories from each other. It’s hard to remember because they all looked, roughly, the same (give or take the odd server icon). The ones that I remember best were also the best at centering themselves around a purpose. So I could say: here are the math nerds, here are the Minecraft tryhards, here are the Californians. A server’s theme was its anchor. Servers without anchors never lasted very long. Sometimes the theme was as simple as “we all go to the same school”, and because Garrett went to school in the Bay Area, in the maybe-Minecraft server I also found one nerd talking about Vue.js for web development, and that’s how I came to meet Aidan.
In a patch of shade a few feet off of the platform, I checked my sunburn from the previous day’s biking. It was hot, I remember, and my skin was starting to peel. I prayed to god that Garrett’s car had AC, and realized that I couldn’t look for it because I had no idea what it even looked like.
Dude why are you like, wearing a jacket, was the first thing he said to me. And I said why are you so short? In response he locked the passenger door. So I had to apologize before I could get in the van and complain about my unfortunate encounter with the big fireball in the sky.
Those days seem impossibly far away now. So far that they might as well be from another life. I remember that he was Scottish, at least half, which gave him the red hair and cheek freckles. And I also remember he was not the greatest at video games. But then he’d stopped playing. I’d also stopped.
We picked up Aidan and got something to eat. In-N-Out, probably. We went to a theme park, where we, like any three normal high schoolers, waited impatiently for the lines to inch forward. I tugged at my jacket as we waited in line, feeling self-conscious and trying not to draw attention to myself.
Back home, when my mom asked how it went with seeing my friends, I couldn’t help but admire her unquestioning acceptance of my lie. Perhaps for her it was normal to hop on a train just to see some people from school. Perhaps she assumed that these were people in the second or third ring. But the truth was that nobody from school had made it past the outer satellite ring. As I’d learn years later in a college psychology course, proximity and convenience were the two biggest predictors of friendship, suggesting grimly a categorization of relationships based on how convenient it was to maintain. Perhaps, then, part of what drew us together was the far distance and the inconvenience. It being a kind of proof that we had successfully jumped out of the sociology which was applicable to the majority’s and traditional avenues of relationship.
And she asked how it went. It was fine, I said. Fast food, theme park, then home. She had no reason to be suspicious. And yes, looking back, there was quite possibly nothing out of the ordinary.
II. Convenience
When I met Asmé a couple months ago, neither of us had found it worthwhile to talk about how we met. It was Friday night around finals week, and she gave me a tour of Stanford as we caught up. We talked of summer plans and career directions, of her research internship and my going off to Asia.
If you’ve never done this before, meet someone from the internet, I would describe it as—it feels like you’re meeting their physical avatar (as in the movie Avatar). There's a surrealness to the whole thing. You know what they look like, sound like, you know who they are talking about when they talk about people. But you still need a moment to register the shape of their body in your head. Maybe you spend the first few minutes fussing over how much physical touch they’re comfortable with. But then you realize you’re listening to their voice with more intention than perhaps you ever have, and that your phone or laptop speakers just aren’t that good at replicating the timbre of their voice.
And also, well… who knows when you’re going to hear it again?
We circled the campus and went to her dorm, where she gave me two bottles of perfume that she brought back from Pakistan, then walked me to the train station. On the train I ran through the past few days in my head. There was a list of names on my phone of all the people who I met in the past couple of days. I became afraid, then, of the inevitability that I’d sooner or later forget about all of them. Retain only the useless details like their job or where and what they study, and nothing important, like the sound of their voice or the way they held themselves. On a whim I picked up my phone and scrolled through the message histories on Instagram and Discord.
I was shocked to find that many of these instances came back to me clear as day, but also disappointed by many more that didn’t seem like they’d happened at all.
It felt a bit like the Gen Z equivalent of digging through piles and boxes of old photographs. In this analogy, perhaps you pick one up that’s almost entirely faded, and you stare at the people in the picture, discernible only by a faint outline, thinking Who the f- is this? Then as you scroll slowly the memory sharpens, and the people you both used to be twists into focus. The first thing you notice is how cringey you used to be. The second thing is how readily you threw yourselves into each other.
Earlier that week, Aidan, who’d kept in touch with all these years, had introduced me to a bunch of his friends at a weekly Wednesday dinner. The hosts cooked, the waist-height lamps lighted, the speaker music-ed and the guests chattered. I was introduced as Aidan’s friend from a faraway land, sleeping on his couch for a week, they asked how we met: Apex Legends, then the discord server, and so on. Then I turned the question back towards them—what had brought them here? There was a scatter of answers, but perhaps unsurprisingly, many of them had met through the internet as well.
In some ways it’s statistical. A typical school in America has how many students—2000? 3000? How many people in a school of two thousand can you realistically become close friends with? Being online increases your surface area drastically.
Everyone was surprisingly normal as far as cracked tech people in SF go. AI talk made their rounds in the room, but so did talks of improv comedy, literature, film, and crises of faith in the direction that their life was going. The whole place was enveloped in the scent of a pine candle (though none were burning), and though I knew there were no whitebark pines in San Francisco I wouldn’t have been surprised then, to look out the window and see their ragged triangular edges silhouetted against some falling snow. At least, that is how I remember it.
Coincidentally someone at the dinner had read a post I wrote a long time ago relating music to friends, likening relationships with people to different kinds of fire. “When I look through my top songs from this year, the feeling I find in each song is the result of what happened to that initial spark. Some songs burned hotly and then fizzled out. Some extinguished without reason. Some unlucky sparks became scalding dumpster fires. Yet there are others who continue to be steady flames, radiating warmly as they had always done.” Was it not true that some people were like the vernal sun and others were like a pine candle? And then there were the fireworks, brilliant and ephemeral; grease fires, which start by accident and feed on the fat of pigs; there is the combustive fire in engines and the inferno fire in Californian forests; the kind that keeps your house warm; the kind that heats your kettle.
Of course I was not really thinking about all of this at the dinner, because there were many people to talk to, and later in the night another friend from my online high school days even pulled up to the party. The same Discord server, it so happened, where I met Asmé.
Even though I was the one who introduced them, Aidan and Arjun met first in the bay after Arjun went there for school. We, on the other hand, had never met despite having known each other for seven years. Who would’ve guessed that our first time meeting would be in the house of a friend of a mutual friend?
Nevertheless we talked with ease. Years of untold experiences compressing themselves into a few words. It was not so much that anything was discovered as it was remembered, re-oriented, and re-catalogued in our heads. I breathed a sign of relief to find that he was still mostly the same awesome person as before.
Which leads me to another wonder: At exactly which point does a relationship switch from being ephemeral to longitudinal—when years of unbroken silence becomes an opening instead of a barrier? Are comets special only because you can point to a date on the calendar when it came the closest? That would be good to know. I mean, ideally, we would all want the type of friend who would care about us even if we were kidnapped and disappeared for five years, right? If you disappear, do your satellites just sail off towards some other astronomical body?
I saw Arjun again the day before I left SF and gave him a bag of tea to give to Asmé. A return-gift for the perfume. It was a convenient and unusual delivery, what with Arjun and Asmé going to the same school, me knowing them from the same server. Yet they didn’t know each other. The old photographs continue to elude easy classification.
III. Calm
Having met all three of my online friends in SF, I left California for Asia. There were two more people I had to meet before going to Korea. It was insane, in retrospect, that in some cities my planned itinerary consisted only of the names of people and not of places.
In the overnight sleeper train to Chongqing, I typed out a post to Xiaohongshu looking for people to shop, eat, or go to performances with me etc. Newly emboldened by my success in California, I uploaded pictures of myself and wrote stuff about what I wanted to do.
There was also another reason. Months earlier, still in the semester, I was scrolling on Xiaohongshu when I saw a post titled along the lines of “blah blah experiment, new Harvard psychology study, how to fall in love with a stranger– super cool!” and was immediately disappointed because the post wasn’t about a new study at all, but actually a rebranding of the 36 questions to fall in love thing that was really popular a few years ago. The poster was just looking for a partner to try it out with, and they had already found one. Since the post had blown up, they were encouraging everyone to use the comment section as a platform to find their own partners. Thinking not much of it, I scrolled down and wrote a few sentences.
It only took Alicia a few hours to find that post and DM me. She lived in Shanghai and was coming to the US in the fall for college. She had a cute cat and liked both birds and linguistics. She thought my cat was cute as well, and we agreed on a time to call that weekend.
“I think it's safe to say that the experiment worked”, I said to her months later in a Guangzhou subway station. Maybe a little too well. She had brought a friend from school, and we all spent the rest of the day walking around and eating. And instead of sleeping we played cards on the hotel bed until dawn. The next day we went together to Shenzhen, where Alicia, in turn, met one of my friends from school. We set down our bags and had seafood, and that night, again, we played cards until our eyelids dropped.
I remember being somewhat surprised when Alicia suggested spending a couple of days staying in a hotel together after both of our friends had gone. It was a good idea by all accounts: saving money, saving me from boredom, saving her from her parents. Yet it wouldn't have come to my mind at all had she not proposed it. Something about the brighter the flame, the shorter the candle. Something about stranger danger. There, as an early birthday present, she gave me a pair of earrings, one base clef and one treble clef (which I happen to be cleaning as I voice type this), as well as a disposable film camera.
I don’t remember what we did. To wit, nothing special happened in those days. That was obviously unimportant in the end. Though at first I tried, I didn’t give any more thought to where she should fit in what model of friendship. I remember on that night in Shenzhen, after we packed up the cards, and I showered and returned to the living room to find Alicia sitting on the couch. I sat down next to her and started to talk. About what I honestly can’t recall—but what struck me after, as I laid in bed, was the sense of stillness and calm, that there was nowhere else to be, the same sense of stillness that I had felt walking with Asmé on her campus, and which explained the pine-scented atmosphere at the dinner in SF. It was like standing at the top of a tide and watching the sea, feeling the waves lap over and over, with the sun hanging at some indeterminable position in the sky. Time is an incoherent concept, washed out by light and breeze. And after all the running you did to catch up to the world, you find that it has come to a complete, sudden halt.
thank you so so much to aidan (the same one), alicia (also the same one), and henry for reading and giving feedback on a draft of this post.
this post actually took so much longer to write than I thought it would (I visited SF in May, it is now…)
please like and subscribe if you enjoyed it! :D it’s so quick and clearly, as the evidence shows, you’re not gonna get a lot of emails from me
—though more on the way soon!!! many many things to write about from the past 4 months