Sweet sorrows

by Michelle Chihara

Nothing good comes from phone calls at three a.m.
"I'm so sorry," she began.
The caller ID said the rest.

22 march 99
contributed by daniel

SITE SEEING

It's hard to articulate the mission driving bittersweets.org. Even the site's founder and editor, Maura Johnston, can't really explain it. "I just wanted to put up short stories," Johnston says.

Every day since May 28, 1998, Johnston has been posting a few stark lines on a white screen at http://www.bittersweets.org. Like the one above, each entry captures a moment from a romantic relationship where "one detail is sort of off kilter, or isn't all it seems it is," Johnston says.

The vignettes can be described in general terms. They tend to hint at heartbreak without tackling it head-on. They tend to have a punch line. The situations they describe often hover, like Alanis Morissette lyrics, somewhere between dramatic irony and total bummer. They create a space that feels like the flip side of a daily horoscope for twentysomethings -- a daily moment of recognition that's part shared aesthetic and part the comfort of not being alone in romantic idiocy. The contributors list fills out the sense of wry, self-deprecating communal understanding with an alphabetized index of one-sentence bios ("Daniel is, even now, planning his escape").

A significant portion of early and repeat contributors know Johnston from her presence in the New York new-media scene, where she now works for gURL magazine. But even to her friends, Johnston never explained the site. "People just kind of got it," she says.

As time went on, more and more people wrote in with the right kind of contribution -- though she says, "I still get some people who write in things like, `I've been with my boyfriend for eight years and I love him so much,' " which is "completely wrong." The search engine HotBot once included her site in a cheerful Valentine's Day roundup (also wrong). But by now, "most people just get it."

Bittersweets.org has about 1200 readers a day, and another 500 people receive it via e-mail. Johnston was featured in a piece in the New York Times last spring, and she's even "talking to publishers" about a book deal. She does admit, however, that bittersweets.org seems best suited for the Web, where the skeleton of a poignant moment and an e-mail address can hang suspended in white space, and where the simple act of touching a nerve can set off a sympathetic, and ongoing, vibration.