Someone I Found Online
I was getting real traffic by then. People from other countries reading what I wrote. It went to my head the way it does when you’re young and suddenly visible. I thought it meant something.
I found her on a site called Abby Winters. Just some girl they’d photographed in Melbourne. I looked her up like an idiot and found everything—her birthday, her age, what she was studying. That whole obsessive archaeology you do when you’ve seen someone’s body and convinced yourself you need to know them.
And then I couldn’t stop thinking about her. The kind of fixation that happens when you’ve seen someone’s photos but don’t actually know anything real about them. You look at an image and build an entire person around it. You feel intimate with a stranger, when really all you have is a moment in a room, a camera, light.
What gets me now is that I actually believed my traffic meant something. That having an audience gave me the power to reach across anything. I was completely delusional about it. She had no idea who I was. Still doesn’t.