Facebook Killed My Alter Ego

Have you seen this woman?

In Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll is a goodhearted, honorable man, but after taking a potion, Mr. Hyde, a dark and loathsome part of his personality, surfaces and takes over. That second self is known as an "alter ego." I have always had several, which is nice because it means I'm never alone.

One of my best who showed up about two years ago was Trixie McCoy. She was a cheery sort, very hard-working. She opened an art gallery here in our little town of Freeport, Maine and exhibited a lot of my work. It didn't last long as it turned out that poor Trixie had little patience for dealing with the general public. She closed up shop after four months and slunk off to parts unknown. Nobody has heard from her since.

About two months ago a new one came along. She called herself Aerdna Adour, which anyone with a first-grade education can see is simply my own name spelled backwards. Aerdna described herself on Facebook as a foreigner from a country I never heard of. Anyway, she was an odd one, with only a handful of contacts on Facebook, but those few people professed to like her. She played Words With Friends and did little else; certainly she posed no threat to anyone. Then one day, after about six weeks, Aerdna was gone, vanished without a trace. Facebook eradicated her! Closed her account and wiped her off the map.

My husband, who liked Aerdna even more than he likes me, thinks it was because her foreign-sounding name suggested she was a terrorist. Perhaps. But I would like to know who killed her, and why. If you have any information, please contact me at andreaschamis@gmail.com. (She's another one.)