Seventeen Thousand Crushes

I fall in love roughly seventeen thousand times a day. Models, actresses, strangers on Instagram who post three photos and then disappear forever. Rianne ten Haken. Airi Matsui. Whoever that woman was in the café last Tuesday. It’s less a romantic disposition than a background condition—the ambient frequency of being someone who looks at things.

Salem Mitchell stopped me mid-scroll. She’s from San Diego, Black, covered in freckles—freckles on dark skin being a specific kind of beautiful, the kind that makes you look twice and then a third time to confirm you saw what you saw. Her taste in icons said something real before I’d read a word she’d written: FKA Twigs, Naomi Campbell, Willow Smith. That’s a specific constellation. It tells you something.

Her Instagram and Twitter were where she said things like "sometimes I look like a chocolate cookie"—and meant it as the compliment it was. Her Tumblr was songs and answered questions and selfies, the kind of online presence that felt like an actual person before being an actual person online became professionally complicated. Sometimes she lip-synced. She loved her grandmother. It was all unguarded in a way the internet was already making harder to sustain by 2015.

I have no idea who I’ll fall in love with tomorrow. That’s the deal you make. Today it was Salem Mitchell, and I stand by it completely.