The Internet has spoken:  Your mother would like to become your friend.

On Facebook, that is, the digital abode of countless thousands, breeding ground for communication, and technological eyesore on the face of the postmodern world. It’s a sad, cruel text box to read, bearing only the above statement. Friend. There’s the imitation “friend”--ship of networking websites, the only place where I could ever possibly be friends with 793 people in my life, let alone at one time. And I’m surprised that my biological mother would even venture to ask for this kind of pseudo-relationship.

I’ve found a distinct element of emotional fragility encapsulated in the strangest of warm-weather places, namely, in the act of eating an ice cream cone. The overcrowded freezer in the house where I stay with my self-titled “live-in boyfriend” (though I’m obviously the one “living in”) domesticates a number of frozen yogurts and sugar-free ice creams with regular flavor turnover. Sitting bowlegged on a creaky bench in front of the old ice cream store near our house a few days back, though, I hesitated to light the cigarette that stuck to my knee with the evening humidity; an ice cream outing, it seems, holds some kind of sacred quality of childhood, or at least, of untarnished youth, not meant to be disturbed, and the children slapping the pavement and chortling near my bench did not seem addiction-minded, except perhaps to the taste of dripping cold chocolate on an evening whose temperature only feels too warm to the chaperones. I dedicated my mouth solely to a cone of frozen lime and watched my boyfriend slurp a milkshake filled to the brim.

It was at a juncture when, perhaps in reaching for my cigarette or shifting to dodge a mosquito, I jolted and almost dislodged the glistening green scoops that I felt it, an overpowering sensation entangled in reminiscence and reverie. Memory is flawed; we can claim, upon returning to our honeymoon lodge, that we once again feel the precise novelty and lust and thrill of early marriage, that returning to an empty playground endows us with the juvenile glee of swings and jungle gyms; I have never before been returned to my mindset as a scruffy kindergartener in the way that I was when I jarred that ice cream cone. A dense moment of unexplainable grief ensued, and I recognized it almost immediately, but not quickly enough to avoid receiving it vulnerably, with full intensity.

The contents of a five-year-old’s ice cream cone splattering on the sidewalk are instantly and predictably followed by tears. Though the simplicity of a solution for this accident is apparent—another ice cream cone can be bought, or the family has more ice cream at home, here, have a bite of your brother’s, or, if the kid’s really brave, salvaging the melting lump of lactose remains a possibility—there is no way to evade the ice-cream-cone-cry. It’s something of a great disappointment built on brevity—something sweet and wonderful has ended too soon, in a cold dirty startling splat that thumps you right on the heart. It never sounds as loud as it feels. Watching your ice cream cone hit the ground, though no young child that I’ve met has been able to compute this into cognition to this extent, is seeing innocence shattered; it almost hurts. It’s a startling sad end to a joyful summer night’s endeavor, and when it occurs, the need for pity, the touch of an older hand on your shoulder or a concerned “Oh!” from a mother, ensues promptly. It triggers a reflex for tears and a bubble-lip, the instinct to sniffle and inability to resist the lump in your throat, the lump that resurfaced in that same old spot when, for a moment’s time, I felt that my cone, sculpted with pride and gifted by the sunburnt man behind the counter, had been jeopardized.

I deny my mother’s request. The most painful lies are ironic lies, the kind in Two-Lies-And-A-Truth games, lies that could seemingly be very true, perhaps should be true, and are not. The kind of lie you feel you’re still being told when you retrieve a love letter from an ex-boyfriend; the kind of lie that appears in 10-point Verdana font and asks if you will accept your mother’s offer for “friendship.” The moderators of Facebook.com cannot realize what a sardonically hurtful question they’ve just asked, a request that I will never be able to fulfill. I would have liked to accept this offer at age five, via bedtime stories and idyllic cookie-baking afternoons, not through an imaginary button on a sterile white webpage, to a woman I now know I never knew, though I should have known her better than anyone. Feeling a “mature” kind of pain that involved less swelling of the throat and more anger, I was drawn back to the three seconds I spent as an indulgent toddler on our sweet-tooth escapade last week. Having relocated to a continually-gawky, half-curved adolescent-cum-adult body, I no longer seem to find the space for sherbet-spill sadness, grown up and out of the fantastic and tragic auto-existence of my little years. Sadness at my age can be rationalized away, tempered by ingrown pity sans public tearbursts, or most easily, displaced by the nicotinic therapy of a bright-burning cigarette that illuminates denial and sulk as I distract myself. The good cries come seldom, and by the time they do, they’ve only broken the floodgates once I’ve convinced myself that the issue at hand is really worth the fireworks, and a time-controlled display will be permitted to ensue.

Yet I read the message beneath the request, a text-addendum added by the woman whom technology has endowed: I’d like to know how you’re doing. Past the ice-cream days and into the cigarette era, I’m attuned to alterior motives and the obligations that parents can choose not to fulfill time and again. But my wish that this message could be one of two truths and not a lie selfishly remains, echoing sharply across each memory-blistered strand of emotional fiber. I read seven scripted words that look far kinder, seen through the scanner, than any sentiment that ever existed here, and somewhere in a spinning autocentric child’s world, a pitiful, sweet teardrop of ice cream topples away from my cone, me, left with lip trembling, ready to cry.