Originally posted 2016-11-01 22:11:18.
There is something deeply disturbing about social media; the dead live on through it. It turns out that the dead never really die nowadays; they live on in virtual reality, their pictures and their words floating forever in cyberspace.
I had a friend called Carol. I had never actually met her, but in a world where social media connect people across continents and oceans, that is not so unusual. We knew each other for over two years and the one time we were due to meet — in the same city at the same time — in the end I was unable to go. But she was still my friend and I looked forward to seeing her posts on Facebook, her jokes on Twitter, although they often had me scrambling for my Filipino dictionary. Carol, who was only 21, was getting her life together and she seemed happy, though, as ever, penniless.