Footprints

You meet lots of people. Daily. Most of them just come and go. Most of them you only write a message to or talk a word with. But some of them can be more than that. They  stay awake with you, make you smile, make you think, inspire you - and without noticing, you are getting attached.

Everyone leaves footprints on your heart. Some of them are still walking on it, carefully and slowly, trying not to hurt you by accident. And others, they walk across your heart and leave.

In real life, I don't get attached quickly. I don't make friends easily and there are not many people I really like enough to want them to be my friends. I am happy with what I have, most of the time.

Since I've come to spend more time on the internet than it's probably healthy for me, I recognized a different behaviour. I get attached too fast. The picture the distance can create of someone is putting itself together like a puzzle in my head, and no matter how long we've been talking and what we've been talking about, I begin to draw stories in my head, stories  about meeting and being friends and all that stuff I should actually not think about for we have only been writing. But sometimes I can't help, sometimes it is just too easy to feed my daydreams with that.

Suddenly I am attached to someone I don't know, attached to the illusion of a friend, someone who is not "real" in my world, who has his own life in his town in which I might not matter at all. I know many people have real internet friendships and really end up calling each other and meeting up. And that's awesome. But the way a stranger can suddenly feel like your soulmate scares me. 

But people leave. Even people you never really knew can just leave you, and what happens to me, to the person who got attached too quickly? I am staring at a gap. I am disappointed because I miss the messages and talks and the little mentions that made me smile. The comments or tweets or chats. Suddenly it's all gone. Even they can leave you, they can leave you even faster than real life people may be able to leave you. Because you can just be forgotten, because you are just a nickname, a photo on the internet, a new message.

Maybe I get attached too quickly to those people because I don't get attached to people in real life easily. Maybe I long for falling for someone, to jump into a friendship, to be best friends from a second to another. On the internet it seems so easy to do that.

But as fast it can go, as fast it can end. Probably the persons I talk about don't even know how much I liked them. How much talking to them meant to me. 
And while I was struggling, while I am struggling, I might just have ended up as someone on the internet. And maybe I didn't even leave any footprints.