Part of our shared history was lived in pixels. I’d meet loved ones in the digital ether where we’d share time and space, only not really. It was in this virtual expanse between us that my lover would laugh, pixelated, her joy breaking up into tiny squares. 

We met a few weeks before she left New York for the summer. She was sure and dry at first, like a sun-warmed seashell at low tide. But soon she swelled with a charm that ebbed and flowed, engulfing me in her wave. In the final days of May, I desperately grasped at the invisible string tying her to me, the thinnest of strands loosely tied around our wrists. It was new, freshly woven, but still fragile, fraying like an old friendship bracelet weathered by months of wear.

At the time, I wasn’t sure my appetite to strengthen what was growing between us had anything to do with her specifically. For years I had starved myself, not knowing what I was hungry for. But as June rolled around, and I sat alone in my apartment in Manhattan, I found myself ravenous after thoughts of her.

From her new locale in my hometown of San Francisco, she showed me the view over FaceTime. The fog rolled over the hills and I felt a twinge of homesickness. Or was it some other desire? She took a screenshot and I imagined it in her camera roll, my face of longing.

* * *

Sometime in the spring, The Times posted an article about Floor Time. Think piece after think piece flooded timelines about the health benefits of lying on the floor. This trickled down into the talk show writer’s rooms, to our parents’ televisions, and they called us, “Do you lie on the floor? It’s supposed to be good for dopamine production.”

I’m so curious what our neighbors think about the woman next door crying by her flower bed, my friend texted me, the one who grew medicinal herbs in her backyard and soaked pitchers of water in the moonlight. I pictured her lying in a flower bed of yarrow, tears nourishing the plants as they fell from her eyes.

Some of us didn’t need The Times to tell us that lying on the ground feels good.

What's bringing you back in your body lately?, she texted.

* * *

The heat finally let up for an afternoon. I found a shady spot in the grass lawn that separated the West Side Highway and the Hudson River and tried to ignore the oil-slicked, tanned curve of the woman sunbathing next to me. Sometimes, I thought, I’m no better than a man.

“I wish you were here,” my digital flame said through the screen. She was 3,000 miles away in a park by the Bay, not dissimilar from the one I laid in. I ran my fingers through the sweet-smelling grass and pointed my camera towards the clouds, “What do you see?” A fluffy pair of lips lingered above.

I tried to remember the feeling of her lips on mine. Were we lovers? I wasn’t sure if desire could transcend time, distance, discontinuity. 

* * *

Every passing cloud was a reminder of the bits of data shared across skies. Pieces of me broken up and sent through the ether, put together again in the right order on my admirer’s screen. But sometimes they ended up jumbled, or wires got crossed across dropped calls and unanswered texts.

I sent her a photo of an amorphous cloud when I was stoned. Maybe a heart?, I captioned the photo of what was definitely not a heart-shaped cloud. She didn’t respond.

* * *

They tried to ban TikTok because the kids were filming the revolution. They were warned about it being televised, but they couldn’t foresee the endless scroll. Touch grass, said a comment on a video where a self-diagnosed neurodivergent millennial was dissecting the risks and benefits of Floor Time.

Sometimes insults are good advice.

* * *

Anyone could be a star, if only for a fleeting moment. The internet’s lesbians posted fit-checks and kissed, which, if you think of it, was a modern miracle. They were building a mosaic of sapphic longing in 1080p. The algorithms were oracles, knowing your deepest desires before you did. The comment sections were confessionals. 

A video appeared on my timeline, posted by the first girl I ever went on a date with. I commented, It’s such a small world, but the half-assed attempt to reconnect was buried under other comments telling her how hot she was.

* * *

NEW CELEBRITY TREND–THE HOT RODENT BOYFRIEND. 

GEN Z WOMEN ARE LOOKING FOR HOT “RAT” BOYFRIENDS.

HOW “HOT RODENT” MEN BECAME HEARTTHROBS.

Women weren’t allowed to be ugly. Not that anyone would have loved their facial features being compared to a rat, but at least men could be a little ugly or a little older and still be considered heartthrobs. No one ever described a woman as “ruggedly pretty”.

“How old do I look?” a friend asked me while we stood in line for a club near a group of girls who looked barely old enough to drink. “I don’t know, you look your age to me. I know you too well to be objective.” 

“What about me?” I asked, “Do I look 30?”

* * *

I was suspicious of people who fell in love online. Didn’t they miss certain details in the simulated togetherness? The wrinkles around their beloved’s eyes when they smiled, or the exact tone of their laugh—wasn’t their particular brand of humanity hard to feel through the cold glass screen?

These virtual communions were a paradox, at once intimate and distant.

“It feels like you’re here with me,” she said over video chat a couple weeks into summer, and I knew what she meant. I tried to memorize the sharp angle of her jaw. We both lay facing each other in our respective realities, and it was almost as if I could reach out and stroke her cheek. 

* * *

A good friend of mine, a serial monogamist and textbook Cancer with a penchant for falling in love with emotionally unavailable women, liked to call my love life The Bit. 

The Bit was the addictive, perpetual swiping motion that cycled through potential paramours until a mutual desire was uncovered. It was going on a date with a practical stranger in the hopes their cyberspace persona elicited the same heart-fluttering response in real life. 

Do it for the plot, my friend texted me before my first date, Commit to the bit. 

* * *

Despite growing up in Georgia, she doesn’t have a Southern accent because, as she put it, she grew up on the internet.

* * *

Mid-June I uncovered my old Tumblr account where I obsessively documented every mundane thought from ages 17 to 24. Sometimes I was profound, but mostly I wrote about smoking and being misunderstood.

September 23, 2014, 10:32am

First cigarette in 5 days is heaven unfortunately.

March 3, 2015, 11:56pm

My last google search was "how many calories in an olive".

July 17, 2015, 8:19pm

No one understands that i AM art??

April 29, 2016, 3:44pm

How bout thank u 2 the clouds?

Each post screamed, “I’m real!!!”, corroborating my existence in HTML. At 30, I felt at once emancipated and undeniably tethered to these remnants of myself. Every one was a breadcrumb left waiting so when I finally returned I could find my way back to myself in the dark.

A week after my mother died I posted, On friends, phoebe's mom killed herself too and phoebe turned out relatively okay. The most painful parts of me were like needles in a haystack, hidden between reblogs of skinny white girls in Converse and vague song lyrics from musicians I had never heard of.

* * *

Quiz: What is your attachment style?

Apparently whether or not your mother took you to your soccer games as a child could affect your ability to have a secure relationship in adulthood. 

Rate the following statement on a scale of 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 10 (Strongly Agree): You fear you love people more than they love you.

What does an algorithm even know about love? I paid the $9.99 to find out, but it told me what I already knew. Women who have been told by past romantic partners that they are Too Much don’t have secure attachment styles.

* * *

Delivered. The word hung onto the end of our conversation like a sign saying “Closed. Come back later”. But when?

I woke up at 3am and begged sleep to come back and take the place of that nagging feeling. I reread the message I sent, analyzing its meaning as if I hadn’t been the original author. It didn’t matter how full my life was–and it was–I somehow always found time to yearn.

* * *

It was the end of June and the air was thick in my bedroom when she came to me in a dream. I climbed an ocean-front cliffside lined with limestone-painted houses like in pictures I've seen of Santorini. Suddenly, there she was, a vision in a zip-line harness, descending from the clouds. 

When I woke, it was only 5:06am. I had to be up early anyway to catch a train from New York to Boston to visit my grandparents, so I documented the dream in my journal, and got ready for the travel day. A few minutes after I boarded the train at Penn Station, I received a text.

Hey! I have some news. I came back to New York.

Every tree that sped by the train window was a measure of every question racing through my brain, coming into view only to be quickly replaced anew. We chased clouds along the coast and I thought of her, flying through the atmosphere like in my dream.

* * *

At my grandparent’s house, I made the water for the bath as hot as it would go and turned the extractor fan off. As the mirror above the sink fogged up with steam, I watched the figure of my body become a blur of beige. 

The scalding bath was a return to the womb, the water enveloping every curve and crevice of my body. I let the heat sink into my bones, releasing the tensions of uncertainty. Like a self-baptism, a ritual cleansing not just of the body, but the soul, washing away the endless scroll, the algorithmic noise, and the confusion of the virtual suddenly hurtling towards the visceral.

I was alone, but not lonely, the scalding water and humidified air were my companions, and as I dipped my head under the surface, they helped drown out the cacophony of the outside world. All I could hear was my own heartbeat.

But it didn’t last long. Slowly the quiet made way for the discord of my thoughts to return. I opened the drain and let the water slowly lower, feeling the heaviness return to my body. I dried my hands and texted her, When can I see you?

* * *

Was a screen a mask? As I watched the world fly by through the train window on my way back to New York, I found myself worrying that the visual and communicative distortions in our time apart may have softened my features like the steam in the mirror, and that my real appearance would be jarring and unpleasant faced with the me of her memories.

There was nothing unpleasant about seeing her again, though. Only an hour after my train came in, we embraced. 

Seeing her in person again felt like waking up from a dream, the pixels and the screen boundaries dissolved and there she was, in startling 3D. I noticed everything anew: the small freckle on the top of her right ear, the ends of her hair hitting lower on her shoulders now, the white line on her fingernail where she must’ve hit it on something hard. Details that cameras and screens had attempted to approximate, but could never fully capture.

The gap between the digital and physical had finally collapsed again, and here we were, breathing the same air, sharing the same space. When we finally kissed, it was like a hundred text messages, phone calls, and video chats condensed into a single moment, an accumulation of all the virtual touches that had never quite satisfied. 

The solidity of her body against mine was the realest thing. Forget touching grass, this was the only thing that could ground me, the thing the glass screen had kept at bay. The sensory symphony that announced unmistakably, she was finally here. 

touching grass