Lindsay Lohan’s Gravity

I keep coming across new photos of her and there’s this moment every time where I have to mentally adjust. The image I’m carrying—the one that stuck from twenty years ago—doesn’t match the actual body in the frame. Gravity’s been working. Time’s been working. She’s aged in the way everything does.

The weird part is how much of my attraction was always just image. Not her as a person, but the specific fantasy of her—young, tight, perfect. That version’s still everywhere on the internet, untouched, digitally preserved. Meanwhile the actual human keeps getting older, which is normal and doesn’t mean anything except that I was never attracted to a person, I was attracted to a lie.

I think that’s what bothers me about the new photos. Not that she looks older—everyone looks older, I’ll look older—but that I can see so clearly now that the whole thing was manufactured. The image was the product, not the person. And watching that product degrade is just watching technology fail to do the one thing it was supposed to do: make things stay the same forever.

It’s hard to feel good about any of that once you see it plainly.