Girls I Know From Twitter

Twitter had this stable of women who showed up in the replies—good photos, the kind of thing that made you stare, that made you want to say something. I’d scroll through their tweets and timelines like I was learning who they were, but really I was just looking at them. There was a weird distance in it, close enough to feel like knowing, far enough that I could pretend it meant something.

The old way was to hide this shit. Be polite, pretend you weren’t thinking about their bodies when they walked past you. The internet just made it public. You could say what you actually thought and everyone else would pile on and say it too. Honesty as a feature, not a bug. But it came with something else—the person getting compressed down to that moment when their appearance worked on you, that’s all they were in that context.

The girl in the photo isn’t the girl tweeting about her day, and neither one is who I thought I was getting to know by scrolling. Social media creates a specific kind of distance—close enough to feel like connection, far enough that you’re not actually connecting with anything real. I knew what I was doing. I kept doing it.