[SilverFire]: 229.fragments from a lost time.Digital world.

My fingers glide gently over the familiar keys to log into my accounts, the page loads and I’m in… I don’t remember the click of the mouse that signed me in, but I must have clicked, right? And yet, my fingers linger over the keyboard, far away from the smooth surface of the mouse button.

A conversation box flashes in front of my eyes, shaking me from my thoughts, a simple message is displayed, the sender some yet unseen student dwelling in America, my age, or so I’m told. ‘Hi’ she has said, in my mind I can see her, or at least my image of her, sitting at another computer, waiting for a reply. I trust that the user has told me the truth about who she is, I have no reason, no evidence to doubt her word… but then again, I have no reason to trust it either. But trust it I do, and will continue to do until proven wrong, why would someone make an account just to lie to me, some girl in England, who they can’t touch?

…If the part about living in America was true, of course.

I stare at the simplicity of the message before me, then match it with my own. My fingers skip over two keys lightly before I hit the return key with certainty. We are fast typers now, we who spend our days online, it is almost a sport to us, the techniques we use to type to each other, like badminton, it’s all in the wrist. But it’s not, it’s mainly in the fingers, the way they hover over the keys, punching down sequences, creating words from the symbols printed mechanically on each square-ish block.

My message will have appeared on her screen by now, a word as long as hers, with exactly the opposite, and yet exactly the same meaning: ‘Lo’

There is a brief flash at the bottom of my screen, telling me that she is typing a message, in the blink of an eye it is gone, and in it’s place, her message on my screen. ‘Hows u?’

This question is meaningless, a formality we cling onto, a remnant of the manners drummed into us by our elders, here it doesn’t matter, we can be whoever we want, say whatever we want, spread our fingers freely over the keys, let them glide and form words of freedom, but still we choose to use these old mannerisms, though they no longer hold meaning.

In a flash my reply is on the screen, ‘Fines Dankes,’ – my standard reply to the standard question. I type this every time, no matter whether it is true or not, When my mood is as dark as the winter night my fingers still spell out those words. Almost as an after thought I hit the keys to ask how she is, ‘you?’ I type, the message appearing under my last,

I see a flash, ‘bad day’ is her reply, I frown in brief concern for this person I have yet to meet, and lean forward slightly to type my reply, ‘why? What went wrong?’ I type, sending the message as my finger clips the return key. I look up at the screen and my frown deepens, although I had typed my question in reply to her mood, my message was displayed above hers, ‘wow’ appears underneath both of our lines on my screen. Followed closely by a ‘how’d u do that?!’ I stare at the screen, willing the data to re-arrange itself, put my line under hers, where it belongs. It remains there, a glitch, a scar in the formalities we are running through. My mind stumbles, but my fingers compensate, chasing me more time to think with three simple dots. ‘…’ I bite my bottom lip gently, before flexing my fingers an spelling out ‘dunno, must be my precog abilities,’ I add a small ‘:P’ at the end, so there is no doubt in her mind that I am joking, her reply is simple: ‘lol’. I doubt she did laugh out loud, she may have smiled, but the expression is there.

‘Anyway,’ I type, moving the conversation swiftly on; back into the realms of comfortable formality with a casual tone she cannot hear in my small digital word. ‘why’ve you had a bad day?’ I type. I look down and notice how my fingers flow over the keyboard, moving almost without though to the correct letters. Keyboard… I wonder what tunes my words would play if, like the instrument, each key produced a clear ringing note. Would my words be melodious, sweet sound, pleasant to the mind? Or would it be a discordant clamour of senseless noise?