*Another Moment sponsored by Eharmony*
Something super troubling occurred to me, today. If any of you have ever subscribed to/played the Eharmony game, you know that people periodically delete their accounts. This makes the profile picture turn ghostly white (image filter), and if you click (or touch) that image, it'll tell you that " 'So & So' has moved on, but don't worry!! That just means you're one step closer to finding your special someone!!"
It then proceeds to block, delete, and otherwise wipe any trace of said person's existence from the site. If you'd been talking, your conversations are gone. If they'd been viewing your profile every day, those alerts are gone. Any interaction the two of you had electronically forcefully disappears in an instant... For someone you weren't really into or didn't work out with, that might not be a big deal...
...but what if it's someone you liked, who seemed to like you. What if that said someone had sent you a message just before their account was deleted, but you couldn't read the message because of this 'erasing' process. That literally just happened to me recently, and left me feeling an emotion that's difficult to describe. I've still got my memories of her, but all contact and evidence of our short interactions just vanished...disappeared in an instant..never to return. I'll even soon forget her face and name...as short term memory becomes long term...and unimportant long term fades away into nothing.
It made me think of things like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, any anime romance where the protagonist gets amnesia, the Wong Fu 'Becoming Strangers Again' Video, and other such things about people's presence or significance in your life fading or suddenly vanishing... There's something that just feels really wrong and surreal about that experience...
...and it's made me think. How would you feel if a friend, family member, or romantic relationship...that was really close...were to slowly fade away or vanish overnight... No closure. No way of contact. Nothing. How would you feel, and how would those in your life feel if you were that one to vanish or fade away?
What is this feeling that those ideas and experience have created/left in me? What did that message say? I don't know. I really just don't know...