I don't even remember exactly how old I was back then, but sometime between 15 and 16, I signed up for Myspace.com. I was living in a small town in East Frisia at the time, and social media opened a door to a whole new world for me. Soon, I had virtual friends in Australia, Sweden, and Denmark with whom I chatted about indie bands and other milestones of puberty. We regularly updated our profiles using free HTML generators and played one track after another through our personal music players. Then one day, I bumped into a girl from Germany. We both liked John Frusciante's solo albums and Vincent Gallo's films. It wasn't long before we were talking regularly, exchanging pictures, and every now and then, I'd send her late-night messages full of adolescent anguish after I'd returned drunk from the bar to my bedroom and my thoughts were swirling around in my head again. She was a little older than me and somehow she understood me.
Then one day I deleted my Mypace account. I don't remember exactly why, but I remember sending the girl in question my email address before I left. Emails turned into postcards, letters, and eventually even small packages. I gave her a self-burned CD with the first song I ever recorded – named after her: Sisusophie. And she gave me Georch and Georgine, a wooden love game from Hansen's house. Then we went our separate ways. We lost contact until years later, when we met again on Facebook. We chatted again, sporadically, but at some point I deleted myself from Facebook, too. To this day, I've never met her in person, in real life. But our friendship felt real.
