In the workplace, my focus on writing up a social media caption wavered for a very brief moment when a colleague observed of a much younger one, “I don’t think she even knows what MSN is!”

A small part of my brain began doing the math to ascertain how young that colleague must be to not know MSN even as I instantly recognised that no, I don’t share the same experience of MSN as any one of my team who surrounded me at that moment, who use Telegram and TikTok and all the other modern channels of today, daily, hourly, momentarily.

It might have been years since those three letters evoked this sense of familiarity in me, like bringing up the name of an old friend whom I had once been so close to but whom I had not thought of for a long time.

“Before MSN, there was ICQ,” I muttered without meaning to.

“Oh yes, ICQ…”

“… and before that, there was IRC.” But what was that?, they asked.

And I went on to explain, “ICQ did the ‘Uh-oh…!’ and IRC was the Internet Relay Chat…”

Every one then took their turn trying out the “Uh-oh…!” and the conversation around me continued while inside, I navigated a small quivering as I tried to place this emotion and to reach the tiny tugging at a corner of my memory that was trying to shed light on something important.

It got quiet within. There is a path that would lead me to a special memory which I only vaguely remember has got to do with these Internet chats but at the moment, why should it be one that causes a flurry of disturbance and what is it that I’m forgetting to remember exactly, eluded me.

Liken it to an awakening from a cherished dream whose tendrils still held you captive while the dream slipped away. You feel the wisps of its essence, and you grasp its hold on your heart, but you reach out only to touch its shadow with no concrete edges to scratch the itch.

I couldn’t see it, but the tremor of being exposed, I felt.

If anything, I have only fond memories of those endless nights spent by the big, bulky computers, listening to the Internet being dialed up, and clicking on icons that evolved through the years, from the one that spelled IRC to the cute little ICQ flower that showed green when one is online and, well, some other colour I don’t remember anymore when one isn’t… to the green and blue people icon of MSN that I have only ever tolerated, because we all had to move on to MSN, didn’t we, as much as we adored the ICQ flower and the charming way it announces a new message with ‘Oh-oh!’

How the heart thumped more furiously and our hairs stood on end when our people showed up online as they invariably do sometime after dinner, and how we tried to stay up five minutes later, and ten minutes more, and just one more hour, as we wondered why that special someone we had a crush on wasn’t online that night, and if he was out with another girl, or what was he doing, and how we thought about not being so needy and creepy, stalking an offline icon and willing it to turn the one colour (green) just so to light up our entire world for that one night.

How sweetly patience rewards with the turn of an icon from red to green.

And how crushing it could be when you looked at the clock and realised it was 1 a.m. and that it’s best to call it a day, but hey, you tell yourself, we could always chat again tomorrow.

Those late night chats were precious in the way that friendships could only cement in the silence of the night after the bouts of laughter and idle talk subside to make way for something else to emerge over the same digital space — conversations.

Girlfriends poured out our hearts to one another. Secrets that couldn’t be told in the light of day were then revealed. Was it because it was quieter at nights? Or because it was only by dwelling and staying hidden in the shadows that it didn’t feel as daunting to confess to our insecurities, fears, and even… dreams?

How perfectly we saw one another through the frailty we donned.

How magnificently exposed we allowed ourselves to be, long before the emphasis on shell-words like vulnerability and authenticity came into being.

All those old handles we used to go by have long been buried and forgotten. Once, I had a friend who was my constant presence through the rise and fall of each chat. He was tomato and I was shekina.

He had answered my friend’s call to identify himself to find that he was to be introduced to me on our junior college’s (the equivalent of high school) IRC chatroom. Later, we would migrate together to the ICQ and when he moved to the other end of the world, it was the MSN that facilitated our conversations.

In between, we had been buried in love, heartbreak, fierce fights that started with yelling over the phone and ended with tearful sorrys over the MSN, periods of avoidance, periods of using the MSN chat to replace telephone conversations, and eventually, chatting with each other on MSN when I was at work and he was settling down for the night (and vice versa, because hell, he was still at the opposite end of the world). In between, we had wounded each other, and then taken the tentative steps to reconcile to become almost the best of friends.

How naked and exposed we had been.

I had matched your tomato with my shekina, each of us wearing that other skin with pride, throwing on a name that we might have picked out haphazardly to fill in the necessary data to get an account that would open the door to a million chats, or having seriously considered and gone through serious self-reflection to select the most ideal name that would represent who we thought we were, inside.

(But who was your tomato and why was it once important to me to own shekina that speaks of the divine presence of God?)

Today, we go simply by our name. Because the trend of using other names is over? Or because we are older and are finally at peace with who we are?

For a brief moment today, I remembered tomato and shekina, you and I, endorsed with our lame handles, and I do wonder what happened to those other selves. But then, I pick up my phone and instead of clicking on the Telegram that my younger colleagues stand by, I click on the green Whatsapp icon, type your name into the search bar and I see you, Online.

Oh yes, just like how Neo sees the world beyond the 1s and 0s, I see you. I still do.

Hello, old friend.

Somewhere between truth and fiction, this story was birthed. At times, it’s clear where the line between the two are; increasingly, it’s less important. I never got into any other chats after MSN. My favourite chatroom of all time was that singular, pure white flower which still makes me smile at the memory of how simple and pretty it was, whose ‘Uh-oh…!’ is my siren-call which I still miss most dearly. Do you, too?