It Follows

by Anna Merlan

Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

For a time, the internet lived quietly in a chunky gray desktop computer in my sibling’s room. The computer had, until that point, mostly been for games: it spat out glitchy first-person shooters, misshapen hands grasped around a blackish blur of something that was probably supposed to be a tommy gun. Eventually, it was mostly for the beautiful adventure game Myst, which came home in a large and ceremonial blue box full of CD-ROMs. I never played these games, instead just peering over a shoulder and gasping at the image of a boat cutting through pixelated blue water or blood spurting from the chest of a mushy and barely coded bad guy. I watched the computer; it did not watch me.  

We got the internet, and at first it was hard to tell what exactly it did, aside from causing the computer to let out a tortured series of screeches and burps and beeps as the modem connected. But then AOL Instant Messenger changed everything. 

AIM launched in 1997, when I was 11, and I began using it maybe one or two years later, as a fresh middle schooler. This was my first-ever experience curating what was not yet called my “personal brand” (or “curating,” come to that). I made a profile with an embarrassing screenname and a string of quotes and snippets from songs (also lost to the sands of time; The Cure, probably?) and dove headlong into a world of one-on-one instant messages and chaotic chatrooms. Romances and flirtations bloomed and withered; away messages were carefully crafted to appeal to a crush, or to breezily convey that their absence hadn’t been felt at all, that not hearing the chime of a new message for hours or days hadn’t stung, just a little. The games had changed, from the kind that came on CD-ROMs to a more elemental kind of battle, a competition of flirtation and passion and competitive wit and the carefully pruned, ostentatious display of tastes. 

Things got weirder. A boy was talking to two girls simultaneously, angling for some kind of amorphous boyfriend status that might involve going to the movies or just talking more on AIM. He juggled conversations, was discovered to have been paying them the same compliments. As this was the dark ages, the girls got mad at each other. 

The computer was starting to leach something: interpersonal tension, a slug-trail of strain that led into our rooms and our phone conversations. I had my own landline on a see-through phone, its thick green circuit board agleam, that lit up blue when it rang. I began to prefer the phone when AIM became too stressful. It wasn’t just the teen drama that was off-putting—a threatening, sinister vibe was emerging, too. Much older men I’d never met were messaging me, finding me through those chatrooms; they gave off some kind of sweaty desperation I could smell through the screen. I ignored their messages until they drifted off in search of fresh game.