1. Facebook Friend Purgatory

To the one person who refuses to neither accept nor deny my Facebook friend request:

I don’t know if you will read this, but I am not-so-secretly hoping that you do. That’s why I’ve opened this note up to friends of friends. We have around 50 mutual friends, so this has a better chance of getting to you than a bottled note set out to sea.

I hope this letter finds you in good health and good spirits as I would never wish anything ill on any so-called friend of mine.

I’m writing this because you have had me patiently waiting in Facebook friend purgatory for more than a year now. I feel like Neo at the beginning of The Matrix: Revolutions, trapped in between two worlds waiting to be saved by the Train Man. But I don’t think this train is ever gonna come.

Why have you not acted? Seriously. Enough white people decided in the last year that they could consciously vote for a man based on the content of his character, and not his color. Now, a black man is president. But it takes you more than a year to decide whether or not we can be virtual friends? Did you even vote?

I mean, I obviously know we aren’t the best of friends. But we’ve had many good conversations over the years. OK, maybe they were four or five years ago. And maybe those stimulating dialogues weren’t as frequent as I’d like to remember.

I do remember you scowling at me from time to time when you thought I may have maliciously wronged you or because you’d heard some random rumor. But I thought all of that was smoothed over with the engaging, yet sporadic, instant message conversations we had after graduation.

Surely, I thought we were cool enough to be Facebook friends. I mean, I did take you out for dessert once. So what if I paid for it with a gift certificate I won with a raffle ticket I didn’t buy. I still took you.

I guess we’re not that cool.

It’s crazy because even all of my exes, the ones on Facebook, are my friends. But not you. I’m friends with people I’m not even sure I remember, but have so many common friends with that I feel compelled to accept their requests. But not you. Former bosses, old co-workers, wives of people I met once and even a few people who, on sight, might confuse me with another one of my black Facebook buddies litter my friends list. But not you.

God forbid she ever joins Facebook, but I’d confirm my mother as a friend. I think. Well, maybe not my mother, but you get the point.

For a while I wondered if this was just some bad karma coming back at me like a misguided boomerang. See, I do have one person sitting in my pending friend box that I refuse to confirm or deny. But that’s because the first time I denied said person, he wouldn’t believe that I didn’t want to be his friend. He unwittingly tried again.

So there that person sits, idle, in friend request purgatory, but with reason. I’ve only requested you once, and had you denied me of said internet friendship then, I would have accepted that with some semblance of humility.

I wouldn’t be dumb enough to request you again. I would understand that you don’t want to be Facebook stalked by me.

But you, you have no justifiable cause for leaving our friendship or non-friendship idling behind the gray words “Friend Requested.” No grounds. No excuse. No case. No rationale. No … yes, I used the thesaurus to search for more appropriate synonyms for “no reasoning” just to keep saying you’re wrong. None seemed to work.

Like our non-existent friendship.

It’s OK, though. There are still 540-plus people/friends who are willing to accept that we are, or once were, somewhat familiar with each other in this life (There are definitely a few I might have deleted before that Burger King promotion lost its legs, and I still might. But I’ll save the why for another note).

I guess they’ll have to suffice. And this will just have to be another long-winded version of self-medication. Yes, I write letters that I will never send. But this isn’t one of those.

And if you haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t even want to know the why (i.e., don’t reply). Just click “Ignore” already.

Your Former Acquaintance,

Damon

P.S. Don’t think I didn’t notice that you accepted my friendship on MySpace, and subsequently deleted it for no reason a year later. lol.

cc: Mark Zuckerberg