What You Can’t Buy

The internet is mean about this. It shows you something beautiful and then makes sure you understand you can’t have it. You can buy the lingerie. You can own the object. But the person, the actual presence that makes the image worth looking at, that’s not in the package.

I’ve been staring at pictures of beautiful people online for years. It’s always been like this—the image is real, the possibility is fake. You know this while you’re looking. You’re not confused. And yet you keep opening the pictures, keep scrolling, keep feeling that small ache of knowing exactly what you can’t touch.

Maybe that’s the honest part of it. The internet didn’t invent celebrity or desire or the distance between looking and having. It just made it frictionless. Free. Endlessly available. So you can spend your whole day staring at something that doesn’t exist as anything other than light, knowing exactly what you’re doing, and not stop anyway.

I don’t think I’m supposed to feel good about that. But here we are.