I saw---as you would never again be revealed--you see me as I would never again be revealed.
Forrest Gander
I’ve always had the good fortune of dating offline men. Guys with flip phones or no phone, guys with an old Samsung Galaxy. Guys who genuinely hate Instagram or whose last post dates from two thousand thirteen. And the post is just a photo of a beer can with that yellow filter. And it’s blurry. Anyway, the point is men with little to no online presence. And there is a certain peace of mind that comes with that. What’s that meme with the golden retriever puppy sleeping soundly in bed? You know the one. Pink pillow. The peaceful slumber of a bitch who has nothing to lurk.
The truth is, though, that everyone is always lurking. We lurk because we love, we lurk because we hate, because it’s all we have, or we feel we’re missing a piece of the puzzle. After a harrowing breakup in 2015, I watched my usually extremely offline ex-boyfriend give my poetry Tumblr several visits a day. This went on for months, me writing poems about him, him logging on to read them, and me gleefully checking StatCounter. A little theatre of two, never directly interacting but still needing the other. I didn’t call him out on it; having developed a gratefulness for it, I had no intention of disrupting this dance.
Lately, I feel like a chain-smoking rapunzel, yearning from my balcony, posting little love (and thirst) traps everywhere, things meant for one person sent out to everyone. All of the noise we make separately, these public performances of private longing. We do this to ourselves, a by-product of existing online the way we do, and in doing so, we isolate ourselves further. Because the position of lurker does not invite or inspire communication. It gets so tangled up with shame and obsession that we come to resent ourselves for it. It is simply another addiction, another paranoid loop. We see things and assume and never clarify, building a state of perfect frantic insecurity for ourselves that suits the schizophrenic capitalist environment that furthers our descent into total narcissistic collapse.
Of course, there is something romantic about sending out our little messages in a bottle, hoping to collect some evidence of a ghost. It reminds me of the earliest days of being online, MSN messenger & AIM away messages, little moody signal fires. Watching you watching me. These days, however, the whole thing strikes me more as regressive and worrisome, disconnection being a great concern of mine, both personally and politically. After a long day online of Looking and Longing, the beautiful and thumotic desire inside me turns passive and limp, tired. I rob myself of my agency by placing myself in this watcher disposition; I drive myself insane with the violence of my own curiosity, deformed by thirst. We hope to see imprints of us still around, that the wound isn’t totally healed, and that you can still see through the cracks. We need proof of our impact, little egos refreshing the page.
No one can truly be blamed for human behavior in a deeply unhuman context. However, it becomes dangerous, on both a personal and societal level, when it is never thoroughly examined. This is true about most things. It seems our capacity for scrutiny stops at the self in most cases, but that’s an entirely different topic for an entirely different day. When this skulking isn’t driven by heartbreak, there’s envy, rage, and boredom. And in the same ways that other addictions function, there is isolation, shame, and a reluctance to reach out, to step out of our own agonies. We seem increasingly incapable of communicating our lonelinesses, our most basic needs for connection, instead falling into the self-imposed role of bystander or espion, sometimes both.
I wrote a poem the other day about precisely this. About the act of watching and being watched. It is bitchy and small and pointed, and I did not keep it to myself: I couldn’t; it was for you. A piece of the performance, something with the semblance of belonging to the public. An attempt to remove myself from the role of spectator, to not deny that I am pining for involvement, to not let the ugly grip of caution wrap too tightly around my neck.
Laying naked on the green couch of your mind Every day & rent-free with a gun
After all, isn’t all of this spying about saying me too? And who wouldn’t be frustrated, being left on Seen?
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