The ghosts of internet friends’ past

What are we to each other?

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Embedded subscribers are my ghosts of internet present. —Kate

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That’s oomf.

Growing up online, I did the one thing I was told not to do: I talked to strangers. In reality, they weren’t really strangers at all, but Tumblr users with extensive digital footprints and vulnerable writing I could easily peruse. While I’m sure some of them could have been nefarious figures, I was lucky that they were not. I found peers—teenagers who watched Skins or loved Laura Marling or read John Green books—with whom I could say I grew up with just as much as the people around me IRL.

There was a time in those high school years when myself and these young women spoke more intimately than we did to anyone else in our lives. We never made plans to see each other, because that wasn’t what it was about. In fact, we were flung across the world, from Pennsylvania to California to England and beyond. We were simply each other’s familiar faces on a shared corner of the internet for a few special years. The weird part would come over a decade later.