Friend Request(5)

I think about what it will mean if I become Facebook friends with Sophie, and scroll through my timeline, trying to see it through her eyes. Lots of photos of Henry; posts about childcare stresses and working-mother guilt, especially when Henry was starting school and only went mornings for the first two weeks. I wonder if Sophie has children. If she doesn’t, she’s going to find my timeline extremely tedious. If she scrolls back far enough at least she’ll see the photos from our summer holiday, Henry and I tanned and relaxed, all tension eased away by warmth and distance from home.

What she won’t be able to see is that I was married to Sam, that’s if she doesn’t know already. I removed all the evidence of him from my timeline two years ago when I realised that he’d deleted his own Facebook account, the one with the story of us on it. He had simply started again. All the holidays, the days out, our wedding photos carefully scanned in several years after the event: gone, replaced by his shiny new narrative. He wiped me clean away like a dirty smear on the window.

I check to see if Sophie is Facebook friends with Sam, and she is. He must have his privacy settings very high, because all I can see are his profile photos, which are either of him alone or landscapes, and the date two years ago when he ‘joined Facebook’. I struggle to tear my eyes away from his photo. I know that I’m better off without him. Yet there is still a part of me that yearns to be with him, the two of us luminescent in a dull world that wants everyone to be the same.

I start clicking through the photos on my laptop, trying to find a better one for my profile picture, wondering whether to take a new one, although selfies are always horrendously unflattering, so maybe not. What about one of those ‘amusing’ ones where you put a picture of the back of your head, or a blurred photo? Mind you, maybe she’s looked for me before and seen the current one, so if I change it today and then send her a friend request, she’ll know that I’ve done it on purpose to impress her.

That brings me up short: impress her? My God, is that what I’m trying to do, even after all these years? I look back through the prism of time and it’s perfectly clear that Sophie was using me to shore up her own ego; that she needed someone less attractive, less cool than her to stand beside her and make her shine even brighter. I couldn’t see it then, but she was jostling for position as much as I was, just a few rungs up the ladder. But receiving this message from Maria has plunged me back to the playground and the lunch hall, where fitting in is everything and friendship feels like life and death. My professional achievements, my friends, my son, the life I’ve constructed – it all feels like it’s been built on shifting sands. My feet keep sliding out from under me, and I can sense how little it will take to make me fall.

In the end I leave the photo as it is and merely send a friend request, after some deliberation not including a message. After all, what on earth would I say? Hi Sophie, how’ve you been these past twenty-seven years? That’s a bit weird. Hi Sophie, I’ve had a Facebook friend request from our long-dead schoolmate, have you? Even weirder, especially if she hasn’t.

I sit at the kitchen table, abstractedly chewing the inside of my mouth, eyes on the ‘notifications’ icon. After two minutes, a ‘1’ pops up and I rush to click on it. Sophie Hannigan has accepted your friend request. Naturally she’s the sort of person that’s always on Facebook. She’s not sent me a message, which makes me feel a bit sick and panicky, but I trawl through her profile anyway. While it might not give me much of an insight into what her life is really like, it certainly tells me a lot about how she wants the world to see her. She changes her profile picture once or twice every week, an endless succession of flattering images accompanied by the inevitable compliments from friends of both sexes. One of her male friends, Jim Pett (who appears to be married to someone else) comments on every one: I would, one of them says; I just have, another. Oh Jim, you always have to lower the tone, she replies, mock-disgusted, loving it.

I know that Facebook offers an idealised version of life, edited and primped to show the world what we want it to see. And yet I can’t stifle the pangs of envy at her undimmed beauty, the photos, exotic locations, the comments, the uproarious social whirl, the wide circle of successful friends. There’s no mention of a partner though, nor any sign of children and I catch myself judging her a little bit for this. It seems that even after what I’ve been through I still see it as a marker of success for women: finding a partner, creating life.

When it comes to sending her a message, I am paralysed by indecision. How can I explain what has happened? But who else is there that I can talk to about this? Once I might have spoken to Sam, but that’s out of the question now. I decide to keep it simple and try to be breezy:

Hi Sophie, it’s been a long time! I type, cringing at the desperation that she will surely sense oozing from every word. Looks like we are both in London! Would love to see you some time! Too many exclamation marks but I don’t know how else to communicate breeziness. Clearly I shouldn’t have worried about that because a message pings back immediately.

Hey! Great to hear from you!! Love to see you!! Are you coming to the reunion?

Hope so! I type, my fingers slipping on the keys. Waiting to hear about a possible diary clash but would be great to see everyone!

I’m conscious of the mismatch between the brightness of my tone and the confusion and distress I feel as I type. A voice inside my head (probably Polly’s) is telling me to stop, to ignore the reunion altogether, but I can’t do it.