I am a ghost.
The internet is a great place and all. It really is.
It allows us to connect in ways we never could connect otherwise, with people we never could connect with using any other ways.
But the internet is also a very lonely place.
It's all letters and text on a screen.
Sure, there are voice chats, where you can hear each others' voices.
And even video chatting, where you can see a face, or someone's cat, and hear a voice.
But you can hear and see peope in movies and on TV and on youtube.
As awesome as it is, the internet isn't a replacement for actual real world interaction.
Now, I'm not saying that online relationships with other people aren't real, valid, emotionally invested and meaningful relationships. Far from it.
And there are actually some people out there that can't stand meeting in the flesh, for whatever their reasons might be, and need online interactions and not real life interactions. Those I acknowledge and can appreciate.
But I'm not one of those people.
I need real life interaction.
I love my online friends. My online community. They mean a lot to me.
But I need something real, too. Something that's in front of me. That I can touch and feel the warmth of another living entity, not the warmth of electronics that've been running for a while and have heated up their plastic casing (or whatever the casing of the specific object is made of).
Online, I'm not a person. I'm a whisper. I'm an echo.
I don't have anyone in the Fleshen World except for my husband.
The moment my husband walks out the door to go to work, to run errands, or to do something else that needs to be done, I cease to be a person. My humanity walks right out the door with him, and I return to being a ghost in the machine.
Now please, don't twist my words around and say that I'm implying my husband owns my humanity. That's not what I'm saying at all, and you're a sick fuck and looking too hard for someone to blame or for abuse if that's what you're taking away from this.
If I had my own car and had the energy to go run errands myself while my husband was at work, I would say that the moment I bid the cashier at the grocery store a friendly fairwell and walked out the store, that I left my humanity with the cashier.
When you're the kind of person that needs actual face to face human interaction and you don't get what you need, you tend to feel a sense of loss when you part from the last person you interacted with. It feels like you left your humanity with the last person you spent time with. (To be quite honest, that's a very scary feeling, when the last person you interacted with is someone you don't know very well.)
I hope to one day not have to feel this way.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure I'll ever be so lucky. But in the meantime, I'm happy that at least the vast majority of the time, it's my husband guarding over my humanity and not some random ass stranger that bagged my groceries by putting a half gallon of milk in the same bag as eggs, a loaf of bread, and a pint of ice cream just because it would all fit. God only knows where they would've stuck my humanity.