A Kind of Seduction

[Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Maya Catherine Popa’s review, “Forever Writing from Ireland,”  appears in the September 2015 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.]

When I was twelve, the thing to do, if you were twelve, was create a screen name and join America Online. This required some thought, the first effort being one, no doubt, of several iterations. The initials, the anagram, the flirtatious, the nonsensical—possibilities materialized easily—the sports team, the band, the idiom. Invariably, the name you landed on was already taken, and you were prompted to choose a number, reminding you of your place in time.

Text messaging wasn’t affordable. Cell phone screens were tiny, pixelated rectangles, hardly conducive for sharing the details of one’s day. MySpace didn’t exist, and Facebook’s creator wasn’t yet in high school. This was the late 1990s and early 2000s; everyone was on AIM. The screen name allowed you to extend your life online, to take linguistic risks you might not take in the real world. It allowed you to spend your afternoons and evenings writing; a conversation, after all, was something you built together, line by line.

Each afternoon, you rushed home in hopes of finding your crush “on.” Your best friend provided steady background commentary as events were catalogued, revisited and interpreted. Since conversations weren’t designed to be saved (though you occasionally saved them), you spoke freely for pages. You could open up to a stranger, see him or her the next day as though it never happened. Or that conversation, that collaborative written artifact, could be the start of a seduction, an affection that began in language and bloomed into the real world.

How many years might this have spanned? How many hundreds of thousands of pages of banter and confession were exchanged?

Neuroscience tells us that if we want to make the most of brain development, we should spend our adolescent years cultivating passions, deftly practicing and surpassing personal bests. As the prefrontal cortex grows, connections are formed and fortified. Whether or not I knew I wanted to write and teach great writing, I spent each afternoon conjuring a written voice that would, in some ways, no longer be familiar to me. Each day, I anticipated sitting down to write at a computer. This was also around the time I developed an affinity for poetry, so that all of the vehicles of desire assumed their places at once, and what was designed to be a pastime became a passion. At the screen, you could fall in longing over and over again. It was the first lyric intimacy, a slow seduction with words and the unlikely ways they could shape.

Even the “Away Messages,” intended to allow you to leave the application open while tending to other obligations (dinner and homework), were only performances of absence, each idiosyncratic memo relaying an inside joke or cryptic summons to write into the ether. Addressing the unknown listener, you became a powerful non-presence. When you returned, if you had ever really left the screen, if you hadn’t just disappeared mid-conversation with a crush to stir his response, you scrolled through pages of writing, which your very departure had inspired.

The whole pursuit now seems washed in wistful sincerity. Choosing a screen name, you identified with the stars of your personal constellations. In time, this kind of earnestness embarrasses, but it should be cherished. The balance between reason and feeling is so often tested later in life—rarely is it as easy to stand for desire, down to your absence and name. It’s no secret that we put what we love in our poems and what we want preserved, though just as often we may not realize what is passing us quickly enough to preserve it.

I recognize that my nostalgia is equally for the medium as for those few years when, for lack of other obligations, I had hours to spend talking to friends who, for lack of other channels, depended on the same messenger each night. A few years later and we might have chosen photos over description. The peculiarity is that the more available the means, the less they seem to draw. An excess of options has desire diluted. Life seems to narrow after those boundless, fervent years, occasionally even dulling under challenges and demands. But great writing, sometimes even the memory of lesser writing, reminds us that we are always capable of feeling deeply.