Oh, I tell you. This story is a perfect recipe for stalking. But we are all stalkers, anyway, thanks to the Internet. If I tell my women friends of what I have been doing lately, they will pretend to freak out. I bet that in one form or another they have done something similar. Some even go to the extent of posting, re-posting and sharing the individually tagged pictures of their boy crushes to friends who are insanely calibrated to drool over guys with bulging abs, pecs, biceps, triceps and traps.
Sometimes, I cannot help but smile when men are generally judged to be objectifiers of women when women do the same. “Oh, yeah! Men are pigs!” one girl friend told me. “Only thing they can think of is tits.” And then she went on talking about how she likes guys with hard rock abs or guys that are driven, i.e., hardworking = money = love (?). I wish I could say I was kidding, but check a Yahoo survey last year that says women prefer guys who are rich but look like Igor who is waiting for the next lightning to strike Dr. Frankenstein’s antenna. I often hear the “good looks versus personality” arguments and I am close to believing that what women mean by personality is financial security.
But I will go a little freakier if you may. I also saved the pictures of my Facebook crush in a folder file. Then I played some music while putting the pictures on a slideshow. The song was When We Dance by Sting. Sting’s voice reverberated and again and again the line went, “When we dance angels go run and hide their wings,”while her pictures slid from slide to slide with the same smile and her eyes perfectly looking straight through me singing Sting’s every line.
This exercise went on for days, this cyber stalking. I wish I could say I am the cyberspace version of Vladimir Nabokov, but this golden-haired beauty is no longer a Lolita who is the light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul (if I may sparsely borrow from Nabokov’s lips).
Then I stopped. I deleted the pictures. I stopped listening to Sting (well, at least I stopped listening to When We Dance). It was back to checking out Autoblog and reading up on CNN and news about Celexa side effects and the Kardashian sisters.
I just want her to remain a vivid memory of someone I wish who could be with me. There is no intention of knowing her from the starts. I do not want to get disappointed. I do not want to find out what she did in the morning or what time she went to bed in the evening. A friend once told me she is very smart, but how smart she is I will never know.
I am not scared of her. If she is up to it we can even have a staring contest. Whoever blinks first gets his or her eyes wiped by a deodorant roll-on. I am simply and fully satisfied to have looked at her pictures and crafted in my mind astounding wonderlands much dreamier than Alice’s looking glass. I am happier to have known that I am still capable of loving a total stranger without expecting anything in return. Without having to tell her my feelings that I am so sure are true.
I do not expect her to profess her undying love with the universe as her witness. Nothing of that sort. No expressions of complete devotion, of rhythmic lines, poems and heartbeats. It is enough for me that she exists in my mind with her head tilted to the right (from my point-of-view, that is), few strands of hair lightly and delicately touching her face and her expressive golden brown eyes sparkling like a distant star matched with a smile that is both big and small. And from the looking glass, I will love her from a distance.