Miss Misery Read Free Page A

red-haired Emily, who took too many pills on Christmas Eve two years ago and will always regret it, even now as she applies to Yale.
    I followed Lizzie through three boyfriends, two career goals, one major surgery, and more than 200 horrible, recklessly indulgent poems. I followed Gus on his first ever rock and roll tour—with his deathcore quintet Funereal Winch—which took him and his $150 bass (paid for by a miserable summer working at Quiznos) through suburban Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania, and I followed him through all the exploded friendships and busted feelings that resulted from it. I followed Ronald and Chelsea from first date to first kiss, from awkward courtship to miserable, shrieking breakup, all without leaving my apartment.
    Once I met these people and their friends I couldn’t look away. I knew them, intimately—ridiculously intimately—but we’d never been in the same room. I knew their hopes, dreams, fears, crushes, likes, dislikes, and permanent scars, but I didn’t know their last names. I started early on a Tuesday morning, tripping from one noisy shout of a life to another, and didn’t stop until late the next day.
    Because the thing was, it was possible to lose yourself in other people’s online lives. Completely. Spend hours and days and weeks in other people’s contexts, fill up your browser’s bookmarks with pages like xBlueStarsx and WHITNEY’S JOURNAL, stop taking phone calls from your real friends, and forget what was new in your own existence. I certainly did.
    It was all the voyeuristic thrills of eavesdropping, of reality TV, played out in front of me in real time, in real lives. It was messy, it was constant, it was happening. And more than anything else it gave me a feeling—a catch in the throat, a fuzziness in the stomach—that lay somewhere between nostalgia and hunger. It was the same feeling I got when I flipped through my high-school yearbook and read the strangely familiar things written in blue ink by people whose names I didn’t remember; the same feeling I got when I Googled nursery-school playmates and summer-camp crushes. It was missed opportunity and lost youth and a fleeting memory of a time slightly before regret. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. It felt like falling down the stairs.
    And that was how I’d met her. Miss Misery, my online muse—or obsession. I hadn’t actually met her, of course. That would be so twentieth century! Besides, she lived in Toronto, was five years younger than me, and had the sort of life that I’d never quite managed for myself, one that seemed fueled entirely by cigarettes, cheap vodka, and pasty-faced bands that aped the pasty-faced British bands of the eighties. Once I’d stumbled onto her diary, spied her oh-so-arty, oh-so-angled photo (hair: black, tousled; lips: pouting or bruised; background: rain-spattered car window; cumulative effect: heart-melting), I was in love or in lust, or in some as yet undetermined four-letter word beginning with L that referred to an intimate reaction only possible with a keyboard in front of you. She lived with her father and waited tables at a French-Asian-fusion bistro. She was allergic to peanuts and dogs, played softball and gin rummy, and reread Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood every year on her birthday. She drank and flirted like a professional. She was on a “leave of absence” from art school and didn’t seem to have any intention of ever returning. She didn’t know where she was going, but she went out every night anyway. Her name was Cath Kennedy and I thought about her constantly.
    But I didn’t e-mail her and I certainly didn’t interview her for the story (which ran at 450 overly edited words in the February issue of Transmission magazine). No. Rather, I added her to my buddy list, watched her flickering presence sign on and off, and hit REFRESH on her diary at least five times a