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Greta Gerwig in a still from Frances Ha (2012)
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That day I felt like I was ready for change, like the username I'd had for roughly three years had stopped feeling like me. It was time for me to leave it behind, so off I went looking for that new extension of my identity.
This was in 2014, and Jenny Lewis had just released her gorgeous album The Voyager. It's still so relevant and wonderful that I forget it's almost two years old sometimes. One of my favorite tracks off it was the opener, an empowering builder-upper titled "Head Underwater." So I tried to see if @headunderwater had been taken, and, well, it was. (Eventually I landed on @likemoodstones, from a lyric in "Late Bloomer." But I digress.)
Usually it's super frustrating when somebody has already taken the username you wanted, even moreso when the account has been unused for over half a decade. But in this case, I was enthralled.
@headunderwater was created on December 23rd, 2007. Can't figure out the exact time because 1) the Twitter timezone settings on this computer are wonky, and 2) I can't tell which location they'd been written from, although the phrase "right trolleyed" hints at it being in the UK. Based on given details, it seems that all 21 tweets on the page had been put up in a span of only 84 minutes.
Before I go on, here's a quick transcript of everything the person had written, using time stamps that are probably inaccurate, just to show the passage of time:
9:34 AM
...Christmas party at Reba's, tonight...afternoon, going over to see Liese and her parents, kids, husband, pets, neighbors, etc....
9:36 AM
Now...wasting time on the computer so that I don't pay attention to the hole in my life where my dog used to be... it's not working.
9:57 AM
I am still trying to figure out how the whole story ended this way....me in Bill's bed, him coming home bleeding and her in his bed,notmine
10:01 AM
He tried to ride his bike home...fell into a barbed wire fence twice...and ripped the hell out of his jeans...almost lost his AC/DC hat...
10:02 AM
The next morning they asked me if he had got a ride home...I said, "Yeah...I guess so..." Then I had a flashback of his arrival! Hilarity!
10:03 AM
Last time he just fell down the side of the hill at the bonfire.
Bill will be my favorite character so far...if he makes it... damn....
10:26 AM
So, for four years she was a want held at arm's length. I do that with straight girls with whom I could fall in love...four years of work.
10:26 AM
Then she kissed me.
Four years of work, gone.
10:28 AM
Long, blond hair...proper ideals...or so I thought..I guess not when it applies to her..or maybe it's the application which presented issue.
10:30 AM
I learn the hard way...I am also a romantic...I believe what I want to believe will happen, will...(that was a complicated statement...)
10:31 AM
Apparently, it was nothing. We all went to visit for Shanti's and William's wedding and i was greeted by Shanti...and shocked.
10:34 AM
I arrived at the bar and Shanti said, "Claire is down at the end of the bar with her new man."
Really?...
Really? Ok..
I went to get a beer.
10:39 AM
But that doesn't explain how I ended up in bed with Bill...
or even how he ended up in barbed wire..
...not even close to the Marlene saga..
10:40 AM
There was a lot of beer involved....
and a lot of drama....
but mostly...beer.... a lot of beer.
10:47 AM
There were also hats involved.
I looked damned good in Billy's hat.
It's a look I need to replicate.
So there were hats involved...a lot.
10:48 AM
And occasional episodes of lesbian drama...
can't get enough girl drama...
even with hats... it's still just girl drama....
and beer...lots.
10:50 AM
So I was replaced in the bed by a boy.
Marlene was right trolleyed and was possessive of the sofa, but willing to share. Ridiculous notion.
10:51 AM
I chose Billy's bed.
This is not to say that I chose Billy.
Billy chose barbed wire on a bike.
His methods of transport are spotty, at best.
10:52 AM
Thus, the injury as a result of the perilous journey home.
"More blood from Billy, Chapter 2", I shall call it.
Bikes can kill.
10:55 AM
Hélas, I tire of my own story...
I may tell more later....
may not.
11:00 AMPart of why I became obsessed with all this is the sheer mystery and anonymity of it. The display image is a popular one of an alleyway in Fez, a major city in Morocco. There's no name given. This person seems to have made a Twitter just to exorcise these raw feelings and developments in a series of matter-of-fact musings with 140 characters or less, only to abandon it and disappear into the abyss of a web then still ruled by MySpace and Multiply.
I have to go sober up.
I have been drinking and smoking for three days.
My dog died Friday.
Now I have to go see family friends.
Mustn'tslur
There's also so much intrigue! I wonder sometimes if it's fact or fiction or a mix of the two. It's just far-fetched enough to actually have happened. Billy and Claire and Marlene and the wedding and the booze and the bleeding and the beds and the poor dead dog and our sad, disheveled, slightly messed-up hero/ine. (I also love that you can't tell what gender they are, but out of context clues I'm guessing it's a woman who loves other women.) I think it's because it recalls so many of our own stories of being single and fumbling toward adulthood; all that loneliness and the foolish things we do in the vulnerability of night, feeble attempts to placate it, to will it to go away, most of which we regret in the morning. The confusion, and the vices, and the heartbreak.
(Amazingly, the lyrics to Jenny Lewis' own "Head Underwater" seem to fit all of these perfectly.)
But the main reason I can't get over these tweets is the incredible, incredible writing. My favorites from the pile are the ones sent at 9:57, the two at 10:26 (WOW), and the ones at 10:30, 10:39, 10:51, and finally the closer at 11:00, that "Mustn'tslur" such a punch to the gut. Poignant, confessional, literary. It's so terse, but, shit, so good. The effect is a certain subtlety that makes it feel handwritten, like you're reading someone's diary. There's minimalism in full effect, for sure, but there's also those little details that make them so real and so human.
Finding this account felt like stumbling upon graffiti, or throwaway art, or one of those poems etched into library desks. There's just something so freeing and brave about leaving something so personal, all that catharsis, for anyone to discover, yet still keeping it to yourself somehow because nobody knows who you are.
Stranger, first of all, I'm sorry. I will never know your full story or truly understand the purpose of your cyber-tirade that's been consigned to oblivion, nor am I likely to ever hear from you again and know it for certain. I know it's not my place to put your writing and your story up on this blog, especially eight years after the fact. I'm usually not so exploitative. But I think it deserves an audience, if only because it's able to elicit such strong feelings in me, and I know I'm not alone. Your voice just resonates.
I hope you're still out there, falling in love (reluctance and caution be damned!) and being unapologetically emotional and writing about it. Maybe even with a new dog.
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