You’re going about your day, thinking everything is totally fine, when suddenly tragedy strikes: Your friend deletes her Facebook page. What was she thinking? Is she okay? And most pressingly, how can you know for sure that she still exists? Try these complicated, annoying, and out-of-the-way tricks to ensure that your friend is alive and well and not lying in a gutter being eaten by wild gorillas or something.
Call her.
Hearing her voice will be nice, but without constant, minute-by-minute updates about her actions and thoughts every moment of every day, how will you know it’s really her? No selfie means no guarantee that this is even the right human being. You haven’t heard her IRL voice in months. You could be on the phone with anyone! Probably a murderer! Probably her murderer who is murdering her! You’ll never know for sure. Terrifying.
See her.
Go to her house? You have no idea where she lives; this is probably impossible. How did people do this before 2005? Maybe a better idea is to check if she still has her Twitter account. If she doesn’t, she’s totally dead. If she ever even existed in the first place. That picture of the bird on her head in Key West—was the bird all an illusion, too?! You may never know.
Ask someone else on Facebook if they’ve seen her.
It’s time to resort to talking to other people. If they say they’ve seen her, good—your friend has survived another day. But if not, it may be time to start the mourning process. After all, without a Facebook status, how can we truly know how many protein bars they ate before noon today?? She will be missed.
Stalk her.
Use all the information you can remember from pages she liked to figure out where she might be. Then, go to all of those places until you see her face. This will involve getting off your couch and walking around on your feet, like a kangaroo or dog on its hind legs or any other creature that doesn’t spend most of its time on a laptop. If you find her but she looks pale or sickly, you may need to get her back on Facebook immediately. A person cannot survive on human connection alone. Human connection doesn’t leave behind proof that it happened! You must save her!!! If you don’t find her, she might be floating through airless deep space, screaming and screaming and screaming.
If you find her: Hold her captive in your house.
This may seem extreme, but you’re doing it for her safety. Keep her near you at all times so you can transform her thoughts into witty posts. If someone does something in the woods, and no one posts a status about it, was the person who did the thing ever born? The answer is no. Tell her this. Tell her she needs to feel alive and in order to do that she must have people around to confirm her aliveness with likes! Yay! Your friend is back!
So the next time your friend says something foolish like, “I think I just need a little Facebook hiatus,” remind her how selfish that would be. She can’t toy with other people’s emotions like that! What about your newsfeed? It needs likes, too! Remind her that she doesn’t have to be alone in this world. She’ll always have you. You and Mark Zuckerberg.
