The site is gone.
No matter how many times Lizzie repeats the phrase her body refuses to believe that it's true. That's the only explanation she has for the insomnia that settled in last night. Or the fact that she is still up at 1 am despite three cups of chamomile tea and an listening to her mom's relaxation tapes under the blue wash of that stupid aquarium.
She gives up and punches the power button on the CD player.
This revelation has done little to dampen her usual skepticism. There has to be more to this site being taken down. Sleep is elusive and her mind ramped up as if it knows that there's something she's missed, but she's lost without her usual tools for research and investigation.
Because the internet? The internet is not somewhere Lizzie is willing to tread. Not yet.
It's like how the longer you wait to get a cavity filled; the harder it is to go to the dentist. At least in that scenario you know what you're getting yourself into: some Novocain, a little drilling, that awful sound of grinding metal on teeth.
The internet is Lizzie's Schrodinger's cat and after the last few videos, well, comments and Tweets have a broader spectrum then dead or alive.
And maybe there's more to it. Without the distraction of taking down the site or following Lydia around the house, Lizzie realizes she's back where she began. It's not terrible. She is happy to be home, glad even. Happy and glad for what the last few weeks have given her with her family.
But she has no idea where to go from here.
There are so many loose ends she has ignored. Things like her thesis, the state in which she abandoned Prof. Reynold's apartment and plenty of paper work with PD human resources. Not to mention a conversation that was cut off so quickly she didn't even realize it until she had boarded the plane and silenced her phone.
Now it's been two weeks and not a peep from the enigmatic William Darcy. If it weren't for the video evidence, she could have sworn she dreamt the whole thing.
Then Jane reconciles with Bing and leaves for New York and Lizzie's situation is thrown into a stark light and it's time to get some perspective. She can't help but think how convenient it is that she recorded every moment in the past year.
She plugs in her external hard drive and opens the folder "LizzieBennetDiaries_uploaded". It's the complete set of videos that are being streamed across the world at this very moment, but these are hers, the originals. Everyone else is watching a duplicate and as identical as each upload must seem, there is something about these copies that are more personal. After five hours of editing and troubleshooting and rebooting and computer crashing, file names tend to reflect the mind state of the creator.
Lizzie's stomach sinks when she reads "Final for real this time – w/ Lydia leaving." It's the file that would eventually be posted to YouTube as "How to Hold a Grudge." A series of editing decisions made after she decided it wasn't worth confronting Lydia. She scrolls down through the thumbnails to get a sense of scope before diving in. Freeze frames of Colins and Colins swim past and part of her wonders what this will really accomplish.
Her stomach sinks when she reads, "Ver. 25 – USE THIS ONE." She remembers the long night spent editing what eventually became "Corporate Interview." How many times she cut around Darcy's compliments to herself. Moments she toyed with saving for her eyes and ears only. The several moments where her face unwittingly revealed more than she had ever dared reveal even to herself. No, the videos don't give her the opportunity to pick and choose what she remembers.
But that's what she needs right now. Nostalgia is one thing, objective assessment is another. At least this way Lizzie can watch the videos without the myriad of opinions that accompany the YouTube videos. Each lilt in her voice, every unconscious eye flutter toward William Darcy (since when did her eyes flutter?), have been poked and prodded on the internet, but that's not where she needs to be right now.
Still unplugged from the greater internet world, but tuning into what's important. That's where she needs to be right now. No matter how painful the experience may be.
