2014
You try to recall the last time you had enjoyed eating something. You remember the sweet burnt smell of the pizza parlor your parents used to take you to after soccer games win or lose, the sweat and dirt on your forearms burning against the oilcloth in your bad manners, your mother touching your shoulder lovingly every once in a while, a referent in her very adult conversation. You had enjoyed this ritual once, on the Saturday that you scored a goal. On that day you were allowed an orange soda and though the pepperoni was the thin kind that hardens up in the oven and the amount of parmesan you had administered clumped inside your mouth, you remember the tip of that first piece falling between your teeth and almost bursting as you bit down. The perfect temperature. The perfect squishiness. The sauce a sour that you loved, the whole thing searing with the saltiness you were learning to appreciate as you grew up and became a man, and the garlic. Your mother had allowed you to down four pieces before looking at you in her worried dinnertable way and saying “ok Larry, that’s enough.” Those fifteen minutes were as blissful as any you can remember.
This afternoon you take a bite of your nitritous turkey and watery yellow mustard sandwich and you think of regurgitation. You wonder how long this sandwich could exist as a paste in the upper portion of your digestive system, paste up, paste down, a yogic cycle, an exercise in sustainability.
You touch a little bruise that’s on your elbow to the table, like a button to rehearse this memory: lia_waits in her blue shearling coat slipping on the ice and you, romantically, trying to catch her, but only achieving contact, through your big coats, your left hand firmly under her waist and your right elbow catching the bike rack. And then only you fell, only you on the ground. You wonder how many times you could press this button; recall, invert.
jessicakes186 has come across an old version of you, secreted in the recesses of a turn inside the internet, not at the end of any one line, but at the intersection of many insignificant ones. She has had to navigate a vast directionless darkness to find this paunchy, years-back avatar, described as a simple guy. People seem to like me ha ha. I am always up for conversation and hanging out. Never really know what to say in these things. I guess you have to know me to get to know me.
Here is an artifact that you have forgotten exists in the world. Your old myspace is like an impression made on someone with whom you have since lost touch. You have erased that person from the limited space of your memory, but from time to time, without consequence, they will recall you and your unique gait, your gesture of feigned wisdom after telling a boringly bad joke, the de-forested look of your sparse chin stubble, the sour laundry smell you carry with you every three to four weeks, your confusion of the words ‘mare’ and ‘mire’ (and your once exclaiming that you were stuck in a ‘virtual quagmare’), your inelegance, your doe eyes, your astonishingly rapid thumb-movement on a game console controller, the rare sound of one of your unselfconscious laughs, the meatiness of your torso, the slowness with which you speak, your preference for diet sodas, your fear of dogs, your love of dogs, the tender way you say ‘bye see ya soon’, your ability to pull off the occasional piece of jewelry, your chewed-up saucony’s, your chewed-up cuticles. They will remember you Larry, they will remember your smile and your pitchy voice with its accent from Nowheresville. They will remember you, and you will be none the wiser.
jessicakes186 txts u that she likes the picture of you in the blue tshirt when your hair was long and the camera is up above you as if you had tumbled into a pile of autumn leaves with it like a new lover and your face is very pale but you have a gentle open-mouthed smile that makes you look actually happy. She says
you look cute
You recall the hours spent trying to capture yourself in a way that didn’t look captured, but ongoing. On that tedious afternoon of selfies you had stumbled out of the house in just your shirt sleeves, though the temperature had dropped dangerously and they had been warning of snow. It took longer than is polite to say to photograph yourself as a sort of attractive dude, and once you had taken a picture that seemed almost good enough you snapped a couple couple couple couple couple just a couple more, the purple goosepimples on your arms forming a sandpapery grit. In the winning photo you’d had to do some expert cropping and blurring to remove any trace of your homer simpson pajama bottoms.
thanks that is so old lol. how’d you even find that?
She doesn’t respond for several hours. You try to gain access to your account but cannot remember your screename and password, and give up, perhaps not wanting to re enter the user experience of that particularly lonely year. Instead you think about how many retroactive impressions you might be making on people and feel ashamed. You wish you had been more careful all along.
/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CCsQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F% %2Fanxiety%2Fwhat-is-wrong-with me&ei=XZ9N VJS6Ocm2yATK7IGwCw&usg=AFQjCNFN6eWfhG9oVs24wgurjUX0TP8LMw&sig2=8lqWhqrM62Q8YftIZwDNrQ&bvm=bv.77880786,d.aWw2Ftests%2Fthe-what’s-wrong-with-me-! test&ei=XZ9NVJS6Ocm2yATK7IGwC w&usg=AFQjCNG N_J =AFQjCNEay kk3N8fmdP2y2KqjFbcDxWAYwA&sig2=S96nB8O7hn5--L5_G9AYeQ& =en&q=whats+wrong+with+me&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://?c lient=safari&rls=en &q =whats+wrong+ with+me&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF 8#q=whats+wrong+with+me &safe=off&rls=en&startclient= safari&rls=en&q=whats+wrong+with+me&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8#q=whats+wrong+with+me&saf e=off&rls=en&start=10
Larry, it seems you never win. It seems you are stuck in a continuous condition of suck. This is the only thing that is clear. Your new oracle is counting on it. jessicakes186 is the rare combination of eyes:grn hair:brn height: 5’6 BMI < 20% who is very sweet looking but still sort of porny. When she found you you went through every photo, comment, like, update and gesture that qualified as you on the internet, hoping to see what she saw, fresh perspective of an eyes:grn hair:brn height: 5’6 BMI < 20% girl. This assessment took days of your life, and when you were done you concluded that you were just as you had always been, which deserves no description. Your profile against her profile did not match.
When she finally does write back to you, you realize that you’ve been occupying a very familiar state of self-pity for almost four hours. Your ass is numb, your eyes sting. She says
hey cutie what are u doing
You know she is not who she says she is, jessicakes186. Or jessicakes186 is not who has just texted you. Or the woman, the physical woman, in the 326 photos jessicakes186 is tagged in does not know you, Larry. Or you are communicating with someone (thing) who could not slip on a patch of ice. Or jessicakes186 is too good to be true. Or jessicakes186 is who she says she is, but no one can ever be that, who they say they are.
Or she is a nice thing to text to at night. This is the third and a half time an oracle has lured you into a state of near-contentment with yourself.
The first time. You should have known better. A gorgeous blonde msgs you from out of the blue and says she’s into Dr. Who too and maybe you two have a lot in common. She flatters you for two weeks before she ever mentions Landmark and how 2G is really not that big of an initiation fee. You are close to booking a flight out to LA but realize that you will have to give up the fantasies you had of making love in front of an open fire or holding hands while rollerblading down Venice Beach boardwalk and you decide that you would rather stop talking to her now and lie to yourself about what transpired between the two of you than find out that you have been recruited into a cult by an oracle who either doesn’t exist or fishes for men like you for a living. You tell yourself that she went back to her old boyfriend and feel rejected but not nearly as vulnerable.
With a felt tip pen you draw figure eights on your mousepad. You open up your webcam and take a few photos, your monitor the only source of light. In one you look like you haven’t been outside in a week (almost true). In another your double chin is prominent. There is one in which you look casually disinterested in the cam’s gaze, your eyes fixated on something on the wall to the right of your computer. You post this one and tag it
just bored after work, idk
Within moments you hear the comforting chime that means she has liked it. And another minute later she comments
Awww, so cute!
You review the evidence again.
=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CEUQFjAF&url=http%30A%2F%2Fwww.sheknows.com%2Flove-and-sex%2Farticles%2F1 014045%2F signs -youre-getting-catfished&ei=N89OVNSpBYSQyQSH14HwDg&usg= search?client =safari&rl s=en&q=am+i+being+catfished&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8=0CD8QFjAE&url=http%3A %2F%2F %2Fposts%2Fam-i-being-catfished&ei =N89OVNSpBYSQy QSH14Hw
Your catalogue-model oracle with the cosmetology degree and angel wing tattoos on the back of her neck cannot be true. Whoever or whatever you have been writing to these past weeks cannot inhabit the supple caramel colored body she says is hers. She must be a crusted and lonely 50+ man, who (like you) can no longer bear the white walls of his condominium, but will make no effort to connect with anyone irl because his deep fear is that he will be exposed and hurt again. You wonder what would happen if you did meet this man, who’s posing as your oracle. If you would be friends or if maybe you’d find yourself attracted to him, because of the things he tells you. You ask the oracle
did you get a web cam yet?
no I didn’t have time to go to best buy, work has been so busy!
you should get one I want to talk to you face to face
I no! I will this week I promise
You cannot remember when it was that you slipped on the ice for lia_waits, between which time and after what date. A moment that exists only inside your elbow. You rehearse the memory, your padded bodies thudding against each other for the splittest second. She hadn’t been who she said she was either, but she had existed enough for you to touch her after a brief and disappointing coffee date.
You imagine sitting across a café table from an old man in an undershirt, the two of you flicking your eyelashes at each other over a shared adoration of the band Fleet Foxes. You decide this would be alright.
You find the transcripts of your relationship with jessicakes and you read them through, slowly. Your heart flutters at the exact moments your heart had fluttered when you first read them. The first time she called you sweet. When she said she’d been waiting all day to talk to you. When she said she felt so comfortable with you. When she said you were like, the smartest guy Larry. You feel aroused the same way you felt aroused when she sent you the seductive studio shot she had just gotten back from the photographer, a white sheet barely covering the side of her breast and her glossy mouth parted in the way that always means “I wanna have sex with you.” You cannot pinpoint the moment that you knew that this oracle was a figment, an apparition, but you aren’t trying all that hard. When you get to the end, you read it over again, even more slowly and attentively. You have found a nice equilibrium in her, you don’t question it.
when can we meet irl?
idk babe im super busy through the new year
maybe we can have valentines together?
yea maybe, that sounds nice
While unbending a paperclip it occurs to you that this happens to you an awful lot. And it’s not like you are a stupid guy. Or really all that gullible. But somehow three and half times you have been targeted to become the butt of a very sick but increasingly comforting joke.
The first and a half time. You had been commenting on a thread about Julian Assange for some time when you garnered lia_waits’ attention. You two talked for 4 months. You told her every dark secret and fear you could come up with, you even invented some. The pictures of her were so hot, you were motherfucking in love. When you drove an hour to meet her for coffee, you found that she was not pretty. Not in the slightest. But you didn’t mind Larry, did you? You had already shared so much with her, things that weren’t even true. You tried to be kind about the fact that she was different than how she had said, was a flatter, ruddier version of the self she had shown you, but she became ashamed and ran off, slipping on the ice. She never talked to you again. Regretfully you erased her text messages from your phone and unfriended her. And now you are stuck rehearsing the one memory of her that made its impression on your body.
And months later when you first met jessicakes186, eyes:grn hair:brn height: 5’6 BMI < 20%, you walked into your house and sat down on the couch, your phone in your hand, without taking your jacket off or even setting your keys on the coffee table. You had had to pee for about 45 minutes but thought that her tiny thumbnail image might disappear altogether if you so much as touched anything else for even a moment. She told you that she was bored. You were bored too. She told you she thought she had seen everything there ever was on netflix. You also. She said modeling was sort of tough because people want you to always be happy. You couldn’t relate, but you offered your sympathy. She wanted to know what it was like where you were. You told her nothing much, its not like anything. It has sidewalks. She loled and you smiled. You knocked your knees together, touched your lips. In this instant you saw a little future opening up, the loop of your experience breaking forward through a tiny chink in the curtain of your loneliness.