I've forgotten her face(book)...

I went looking for a friend's Facebook profile this afternoon, but it wasn't there. As often happens with digital "wrong numbers", I thought it was just a faulty search or user error (perhaps I spelled the name wrong?). After verifying my correct spelling and trying a few more times, I can safely say that information isn't there. My friend has vanished from Facebook.

It's pretty amazing when a person closes up shop at Facebook. The system removes you from the index, but it also removes all information associated with you. It searches out all the references to you on anyone's page and removes them. Any pictures where people identified you remain, but the system no longer knows "who" you are. Any comments left on another person's page are removed.

When it's one of my friends who deletes their account, there's no notification. When you make a new friend, the system prompts you to accept. It allows you to pay attention to who you let into your walled garden. No riff-raff in my space, that's for sure. But when they leave, it's as a shadow in the night. It's completely possible to have no idea that you've lost a friend.

It sort of dawns on me slowly. Wasn't there a picture of me from that one party, holding on to my friend so I don't fall down? Didn't my friend just say something on my page last week; it was really funny and now I can't find it.... Maybe there's a flash of self-doubt: did my friend cut me out as a friend? After a little digging, it appears that all links are broken, all photos unconnected. It's not just me; all traces have been removed.

Where has my friend gone?

I suppose I could call and talk to my friend, but we're not the sort of buddies who talk much on the phone. I would feel terribly obvious if I just called and said, "Hey... how are things with you?" especially since I ordinarily see them everyday. In fact, one of the reasons I'm in the dark is because it's now Spring Break and my routine has been disrupted. So I suppose I'll have to wait a week or hope that the gossip train can kick in.

It's only occurred once before. Year before last, a fellow student vanished from Facebook. I remember sitting in a computer lab when I noticed. The girl sitting next to me was also a friend, and I turned to her and asked, "Do you know what's happened to Ellie?" She frowned, "Is there something wrong?" and I proceeded to show her that that picture wasn't where I thought it would be.

In that case, Ellie had just had a monumental and acrimonious breakup with her fiance'. There were pictures of them together all over Facebook. They had covered each other's walls with sappy love notes, sincere statements of admiration and appreciation, and (worst of all) a hundred mundane things that served as reminders of a less-complicated time. Don't forget to pick up the papers from the office. Can you get milk on the way back from rehearsal. I'll be sure to bring home the tomatoes you asked for. And a hundred other bitter-tasting innocuous notes.

That being the case previously, I currently fear for my friend and the relationship they're in. They're both good people and I'd hate for them to be involved in trouble, especially the kind that makes people virtually burn down their social interactions.
.