RIP AIM, G2G 4Ever

One afternoon in seventh grade I went over to my friend Laura’s house after school and like every middle schooler did every day, we got on AIM. I told her that I was hoping someone in particular would sign on, which is of course was what everyone who signed on to AOL instant messenger was hoping for: that one name to appear under the secret Buddy List group you made just for them. For me it was a boy named Devin who I’d met the summer before at camp. I’d sat on his lap during a game of truth or dare as a dare, although it kind of seemed like he was into it. I wanted to chat with him online, but I was worried my screen name wasn’t cool enough. He’d written his on a piece of scratch paper as we separated at the bus on the last day of camp and told me to IM him: Boardinratzilla. He was a skater boy, or as much of a skater a 12 year old boy can be. Like any middle school skater, I never actually saw evidence of him using a skateboard, he just wore shirts that implied he had the ability to do it if say, a halfpipe appeared in the middle of the camp mess hall and he had to kickflip his way out of there. In any case, I couldn’t let him know my screen name was Katz1102, an homage to my love of felines that I’d been dragging around since 4th grade. My obsession with cats suddenly wasn’t cool in middle school (I’d be vindicated for this later on in the timeline of the internet, don’t worry) and I knew I needed something better. Laura and I agreed, I had to quickly make a new screen name and IM him with it, but what was cool? I didn’t know any skater things but I remembered a catch phrase Devin was famous at camp for saying “Slow down, Exlax.” I had no idea what Exlax was, but Devin seemed to think it was cool, so why not. I quickly created a new screen name: Exlaxchick87 and then I sent him an IM. He did not respond. I waited for days, his name appearing and disappearing on my Buddy list like a lighthouse blinking in the night. Eventually, I got around to looking into what Exlax was. I never contacted him again. He did not return to camp the next year, I assume out of respect for me.

This is the kind of stuff that happened on AIM. It was the wild west of middle school by which I mean not that it was out of control, but that you were free to be someone new. Ok, maybe Exlax Chick was not the alter ego I wanted, but for a skinny blonde 12 year old girl who hadn’t yet developed boobs but had developed hips that hit every doorway she tried to enter because she couldn’t get used to their diameter and vocal chords that accidentally amplified her voice to a volume akin to the loudspeakers at a professional football game that she could not control, the ability to change who I was once safely behind my computer was everything. Your AIM self was not who you were at school. Maybe you carried an insulated lunchbox that your mom made you take to 7th grade even though everyone else had brown paper bags, but on AIM you could tell a boy you “like liked” them ,wait for their reply of “me 2” and then reply “g2g”, and quickly sign off to blast Oasis Wonderwall on your boombox, lie back on your twin bed, and know that the next day at school you’d never again need to discuss the conversation in real life. I had friends in middle school I never once talked to in person, even though they were in my pre-algebra class, but after school on AIM we’d spend hours discussing…honestly I don’t remember what we talked about, just that it went on for hours and was peppered between games of Snood and quickly minimized when a parent walked in the room. AIM was freedom. It was the secret eject button for adolescence that for some reason was bestowed upon our generation. I don’t know why we were the ones who got it, but I do know we used it right: quoting Alice in Wonderland in our away messages to prove we were deep and appreciate literature and Death Cab for Cutie lyrics to show our friends when we were broken. Teens today can send photos through text, but we had to be more clever. You can’t just describe your boobs to the spikest haired boy in 8th grade, you have to subtly hint that you have them now and that you have considered what it might be like to have him touch them.

AIM wasn’t just a way to talk to friends, it was a way to have friends. It seems strange now, but the rules of AIM were this: you could talk to anybody. Not just people you knew from school or even people you kind of knew. You could talk to your friend’s cousin’s friend from Ohio who you’d never met and you could talk to him for hours. AIM wasn’t for pleasant conversation, it was for deep secrets, for revealing the part of yourself that you wouldn’t ever say out loud, to basically anyone who had your screenname. And not the weirdos from chat rooms that your parents thought you were talking to: just regular people, people you knew but were too scared to talk to, people you knew but didn’t know how to say the things you wanted to say face to face, people you wished you knew in real life because they understood you better than anyone you did know. All without judgement because everyone else was doing the same thing. AIM was how we learned to be people in the world and while our parents worried it might be stunting our ability to socialize, I think it was doing the opposite: opening us up to how rich and confusing and satisfying friendship could be if we weren’t afraid. But of course we were. The first time I said I love you to a boy, it was typed in that little white box and it was years before I said it out loud. I never had the kind of conversations I had on AIM in real life. The types of conversations movies tell you you’ll have under the stars on a blanket somewhere in a field of corn or something, I had by the glow of a pixelated screen in my family’s shared TV room long after everyone else had gone to sleep.

Of course I haven’t used AIM in years. Like everyone else, I’ve transitioned to texting and Facebook chat and enthusiastically responding to people’s instagram stories with “OMG LOL is that really your dinner?!”. It would be weird if I was hanging around my old Buddy List, waiting for old friends from summer camp or girls I haven’t spoken to since high school volleyball to make that creaking door sound. But sometimes I miss it. The magic of AIM was that it was singular and it was instant: unless you specified BRB, you were expected to be present, to listen and to respond. We were all trying to be someone else on AIM but we were only trying to impress the person we were speaking to, not create a version of ourselves that wasn’t who we really were like we do on social media. The person we were trying to be wasn’t a copy of a template that we’d seen before: it was the person that we already were that we were scared to show. I know we can’t go back and I would never want to be one of those people who can’t let go of the life I once had, especially when this life is so full of dog photos, readily available at any time, but I’ll miss the world I lived in in AIM, the person that I was when I wasn’t ever afraid.