Social media wasn’t really a thing yet and I never had LiveJournal or MySpace. It’d be four years before I got a cell phone. Most of my time online so far had been passive, a few red-cheeked proto-erotic Yahoo checkers chats excepted. This was in part because my mom, who distrusts technology still, had chided me against putting information about myself on the internet and I was an obedient kid. Creating this Amazon Wishlist, then, was a sort of rebellion. A first skirmish in a war of independence that would in years following be fought.

May 8 was about a month before my birthday in June. The irony: If the list were ostensibly intended for my mother, who would be the one to buy me things, she was the only person I would not tell about it. Though I’m sure I never told anyone about it. This was an era of diaries, not friends. The internet then felt so intimate, small, like a secret I privately — and slowly, dial-up warbling and moaning — learned.

This list was a statement about my identity I made to no one.