It must’ve been in the mid to late 2000’s that I unearthed an ancient MacBook from the closet and claimed it for myself, eager to explore the Internet on my own like many other kids of that era. It was a heavy, slow thing that I dropped and dented a handful of times, but it was a steadfast friend that could I sneak into my room after bedtime to collect free omelets for my Neopets in the dark.
Now, it’s pretty embarrassing to admit how eager I was to come home after school to read trivia listicles on Cracked or dress up my avatar on GaiaOnline, but those were hours that I’d learned to treasure. I was proud of typing literately enough for no one to question whether I was old enough to be posting in those forums in the first place (I wasn’t even close to the age requirement, but I managed to hold back my penchant for emoticons and l33t to avoid suspicion). I made friends, I shared art, I raised my Neopets to greatness, I minded my own business, and I wholeheartedly enjoyed the little microcosms I had found on the Internet.
Of course, you grow up and grow out of those worlds, and I spend the bulk of my online activity elsewhere now. But I revisited a few of my childhood stomping grounds over winter break, and felt strangely nostalgic. After a moment of brainstorming my old passwords and trying to understand all the runaway inflation, I browsed the sites and links and pages I used to visit daily. Each click brought up another familiar surprise; It was like how I felt when I moved at the end of senior year and, as I sorted things into boxes, would sit down and flip through old children’s books I used to love to read. I felt young again, but also so much older at the same time. I didn’t dare look at my old forum posts, though, because there’s only a limited amount of cringing I can survive in a day. Still, I was somehow comforted by the fact that there exists small footprints of who I was and what I thought was important enough to talk about at that time-- that if I ever wanted to, I could make this visit again and get to know my younger self.
It was a weird afternoon of web-surfing, and I might’ve briefly rekindled my Maplestory addiction, but what it really did was remind me of when I wasn’t worried about fake news or the toxicity of certain Internet communities, or even when online activities were less geared towards social networking between people you already know and more about just having fun. As cheesy as it sounds, my brief foray back to the little havens I frequented made me long for the security of those simpler times. Even if that kind of simplicity and security doesn’t really exist online, it at least did for a while, and that’s how those cheesy early 00’s graphics and HTML felt like magic.
