Shannon

Shannon

For some reason this evening my thoughts are centred around a girl named Shannon, that I knew online several years ago -- when I first started a journal on Open Diary.

This isn't a tale of lost love, or undeclared crushes -- or even of two close friends losing each other. But she was a friend, and I can still remember random facts about her -- how she lived in Canada, and used the name Raven to begin with. Her diary was the sporadically updated type -- even more sporadic than is mine, but she had a very distinct writing style.

I don't recall now if she often wrote poetry, or if it was a rare occurrence. If I close my eyes and concentrate hard, I think I can visualise various poems of hers -- though I can't read what they say. I can almost see myself in the third person, sat here in front of her diary and reading her poetry. One poem stood out, though, it was called Lupine Dreams and I can always remember the first line read: "I dreamed of you as you ran with the wolves". I think she said it was inspired by a real dream of her boyfriend, and wolves.

She was an angry and depressed person -- as you might expect -- and I think she was about the age I am now, which would have given us something like a 5-year age gap. We'd talk late into the night on ICQ, and I think we even used voice-chat once or twice. What did we talk about? I can't remember. Probably Fiona, when I was with her. Her boyfriend, who she always referred to as "the boy". It was easy conversation, though it won't ever go down in history.

As I sit here and write I keep pausing and I will stare into space for a minute as I try to recall the names or nicknames of her coworkers from diary entries. I try to recall place names, or the type of job she did.

I'm sorry, Shannon, but I can't.

Just the other day a girl I knew from university -- a sort-of friend of Fiona's -- started talking to me on IM. We hadn't talked in about 4 years, or thereabouts, and to be honest I didn't much care for her when I knew her, let alone now. But maybe Shannon will one day resurface on yahoo, or maybe she never left but thinks it's been too long to talk to someone she didn't know that well to begin either way.

Just the same, I have a copy of her poem kept still, I like it so much. I've searched for the title online, but with no success. I've searched lines from it, but I get no results. She changed her name from ravengirl to Crimson raven, but there's no sense in searching those names -- they'd be too popular.

She's out there, somewhere, tonight. And I hope she's still writing.