msn as kids

It was in 5th grade we started using MSN. Days I went home alone, which started to be more frequent after my two best friends Johannes and Robin started hanging out with each other instead of me, I would go to the computer, open MSN and chat with friends. It was Rebecca, Frida, Soffan, Robin and a few others. We would talk.

It really wasn't about meaningful things. I remember I mostly chatted with Soffan, I had fallen deeply in love with her in the 6th grade, but she was the girlfriend of my friend and nemesis Johan. I would always compare my life with his, and be so jealous. He had two little sisters, a dad who had a cool job, a cool mum and cool ideas. His dad could get us magnetic tape. My dad didn't have a cool job, he was merely the town journalist. My mum wasn't cool, and neither of them had access to magnetic tape. Johan and I were remarkably similar, we would be the very last in first and second grade to finish assignments and dictated maths pages. We'd be meticulous, but slow. We both collected broken lighters wherever we went. We would spend our days in after-school care drawing New York from above. I never had the flair for it, but Robin and Johan did. I wasn't jealous of his characteristics perhaps, but his circumstances. And it certainly wasn't an all-encompassing jealousy, it'd come in pangs when I was alone at home, and leave me just as quickly when life sped up again.

Now, some 5 years later he was going out with the one I loved, so deeply. I brought back cactus flowers to her from a family holiday to Lanzarote. We'd meet at the base of the local water tower, her bringing the springer spaniels Pepsi and Fläcken and we'd go for walks in the forest. She would talk, god knows about what, and I would talk, much less.

They broke up, and while I don't doubt she liked me, she perhaps didn't like me that way and she didn't want to explore that.

In any case, that's not the essence I want to write about. It's more around MSN. I couldn't quite work it out. I needed a rulebook. Most conversations would be following the structure:

And I'd so struggle to get past this... format? I perhaps still do to this day. Now it's much more a question of how I'm feeling. I probably wouldn't initiate a conversation unless I have something meaningful to mention nowadays though, at least not online. But in person, especially with acquaintances and strangers without a meaningful context, I run out of steam, if the other end isn't very good at conversations. I've come to lean into this in closer relationships, where my silence really can prompt people to open up and not feel judged.

But there's a screw loose. I've read some self-help books about how to converse, but I've just never gotten there. My dad isn't far off, he hates menial small-talk. My role model, my grandfather, he was a master small-talker and he'd talk.