"And so we beat on, boats against the current, Facebooking back ceaselessly into the past..."

Last nite I was doing very little, sitting around College in a friend's room to be exact, when the conversation turned somehow to early crushes. Being a recovering Romantic, and still not quite impervious to the occasional bout of sentimentality, I got to thinking of Becky C. I told the aforementioned friend that she had been my first real crush - in those halcyon days between puberty and adolescence when none of us knew what the hell was going on. She was a dark-haired, clever girl of ten with a mouth full of surgical steel when I met her in Dr. Sanek's 5th grade logic class (you heard all that right).

Becky C. - I hadn't thought about her in years. Becky C. who kinda-sorta had the beginnings of a body; Becky C. who got better grades than me in gym; Becky C. who rode the short bus with me all the way home; Becky C. who no doubt didn't even remember me; Becky C. who set the standard for heartbreak for five-plus years. Oh she liked me well enough, but her heart was somewhere else; Josh was his name I think. And, but for a few false starts, I never stood a chance. Regardless, I moved away half way through that year; another school, another town, another state. But it's safe to say that Becky C. from Packanack Lake, New Jersey followed me all the way to Winter Haven, Florida, where she lived for a while under-developed subconscious, until she faded and was replaced by a dozen other silly, ultimately unrequited infatuations.

But my friend had got me thinking.

'Dan', he said. 'You know what you should do?'

'What's that?' I said.

'Facebook her.'

Facebook her. Facebook her. What a thing to say. What an idea. There was an illustrated catalogue of my youth, a virtual grade school reunion, a searchable database of my fucking past just a point and a click away. With just a tinge of (pathetic as it is) nervousness and excitement, I searched for her in the high school I figured she went to; nothing. I searched for her in the high school I didn't figure she went to; no dice. I tried a different spelling of her name, first in one, then in the other.

A single hit popped up, and in the split second it took the page to load I wondered what had happened to her in those years between 10 and 20 when we sweat and bleed out the last of our awkwadness. Then I saw the photo, of a black-haired clever girl of 21 who went to an East Coast Ivy.

Becky C.

"She's fucking hot!" quoth my friend.

"She is fucking hot." I said.

I don't know what I thought, really. Vindicated? That was stupid, wasn't it? Surprised, no doubt. But something else, like someone had punched me in the stomach. Not, as they say, "like I had seen a ghost"; more like I had seen a character I had written in a story, a picture I had drawn, an imaginary friend.

I had the Oracle at Facebook bring up the entire class of 2002 from my would-be high school.

And there was Holly. They told us we should get married in kindergarten, didn't they Holly? Didn't they tell us the two fat kids should get married?

And there was Tyler. Tyler you never quite played the same games as us, did you?

And there was Mike. Mike, we were best friends in third and fourth grade, but do you remember how we fought that day at recess, kicking and punching, hating each other, and how we cried after?

But there also was Holly at a state school, bleach-blonde and bare-belly. You lost so much weight Holly - I'm happy for you.

And there was Tyler at private school, telling me with his furrowed brow and million-mile gaze that he still doesn't quite play the same games we do.

And there was Mike at Rutgers, shirtless, backwards Scarlet Knights cap, taking a long pull off what looked to be a bottle of Southern Comfort.

It was...peculiar. But its not quite right to say, as people often do, that I expected them never to change. The idea of change hardly entered the equation - they were simply my friends - that is, in an important sense, they belonged to me. That they might change was inconceivable, because for me- and perhaps this is morbid - none of them survived my moving away except as memories.

In a cleaner, better world, maybe that's how it would always be. Forever separated by the contingencies of (in my case) a mother's paycheck, too silent and too distant for too long to seriously consider re-establishing contact, and buried from memory by the layers of intervening years - homerooms, fights, parties, handjobs, cafeteria tables, car accidents, whiffle ball games, not to mention diets and million-mile gazes and bottles of Southern Comfort. Maybe that's how it should be. That way I might have kept on remembering to forget Mike and Holly and Tyler and Becky C, instead of staring at an LCD screen, forgetting to remember them.

An Oxford acquaintance once remarked [on a Facebook wall, no less] that the English students, just like the Americans, would "become bored with Facebook in 5....4....3....2...."

But it's already too late, isn't it? You can't click "Home" again.