When I was a little girl of about 7 or 8 one of my favourite passtimes was this: I closed my eyes really tight, waited for a couple of minutes clenching my fists in concentration thinking that when I open my eyes I just might realize that all my life to that day had been a dream and I am, in reality, living a completely different, unknown life. Naturally, every time I opened my eyes I still found myself in our flat, surrounded by the familiar objects and the familiar mess and yet, the possibility of a different outcome filled me with a mix of excitement and apprehension over and over again. Later, once I have given up on finding a new life by closing my eyes, I became more creative: as a pre-teen, I would invent different looks and personalities for myself. I would mentally pick for myself whole (mostly pink) outfits from the shopwindows of the tacky 1980s Hungarian "boutiques" ("butik" was the generic name used to describe the couple of privately owned clothing stores in central Budapest; with the extinction of communism most of them have thankfully become defunct). I would have long conversations with my imaginary friends, parents, siblings; sometimes I would forget myself and talk aloud on the way to French class and would only realize that I got a little carried away through the look of the others. Conventional wisdom is that kids do this because they are unhappy with their lives as it is, or they are strange little outcasts. Perhaps I was, indeed a little strange, but I was not unhappy with my life and I certainly was not lacking in friends or family. Quite the contrary. Our family and social life was so intense and excitingly unconventional in comparison to most kids' at school that my motivation for inventing the other lives was for me to have an ordered and understandable private world that I alone controlled.

Since I have reached adulthood I reduced the number of imaginary conversations significantly. The ones I am still having are internal and (mostly) with actual people in my life, only in imaginary settings, situations or circumstances. For example, if during my morning walk down Rue St. Lazare towards the Alcatel offices the sun is shining, I turn my face towards the sun and imagine that I am in Rio. I then launch into a very vivid internal description of my parallel, imaginary life, a kind of "Sliding Doors" analysis of what it would have been like, had I chosen to go and work at Robin's business in Rio. I can see the people I used to hang out with lying on the beach on a Sunday afternoon; I can almost smell that strange mix: black beans, sewage water and baby poop at the creche in the favela; I can taste the ice cream from the exquisite little cafe I used to go to in Ipanema. All is familiar and real except for my physical presence. While I daydream, the external world becomes the opposite: unfamiliar and unreal except for my physical presence.

As it turns out, imagining things is not such a solitary occupation after all. Thanks to a charmingly intelligent, but very pretentious and slightly exalted Italian and modern technology (email and my all time favourite, the SMS) I have had a virtual "relationship". It started, peaked and ended within a 48-hour time period without any verbal, let alone personal exchange. After meeting him at a dinner party, the well-spoken Italian initiated email contact, which he then transformed into an sms exchange. It took perhaps 7-8 emails and 15-18 text messages and I somehow found myself refusing a romantic offer of meaningless s*x (on account of a girlfriend), followed by the receipt of a "let's just be friends then" message (odd, considering our brief history). I am not really sure how we reached that stage. The exchange was entertaining: he was articulate and challenging, and I enjoyed practising my "biting irony", as my new flirt put it. And yet, the whole situation is absurd and not so different from my childhood fantasizing and dreamed up stories, except that I happened to be involved in another person's fantasy world.

This incident made me think about the effect of text messaging and emailing on (romantic)relationships. That two people interpret the same situation completely differently happens quite often anyway. B. Easton Ellis is not my favourite writer, but the narrative structure in Rules of Attraction captures this problem very well. Texting however, adds a whole new level. On the one hand, frequency and the buttons act as some kind of a shield: it lowers the stakes and renders communication more daring, as it were. On the other, the exchange becomes more restricted: there is only so much you can convey in 160 characters per message. End result: this feeling of absurd, dream-like alienation, which is very comfortable and unthreatening, but also depressingly shallow and vacuous.