I Want You To Know Me - White Light
White Light
Whale EP (2021)
Having come into adolescence alongside peak blogging culture, the temptation to lurk amongst banal internet debris still thrives. I used to make friends this way, the chance encounters magical. In the spring of 2012 I spent a morning waxing poetic about a particular photographer, posting a collection of photos capturing dusty blue and cream stretches of American cattle ranches. Later in the day I borrowed my mum’s border collie for a walk. In the grey of a west-coast drizzle, we crossed paths with a man and his own collie, both of them red haired and gorgeous in the mud. I was flattered at the exchange and shocked when I returned home to find a comment on my Tumblr. “I took these photos. I think we just met.”
A year of walking around Vancouver together failed to cure my nervousness or my pining. Once he gave me a sheepskin coat to wear on a particularly cold stroll home. I could feel the shape of him in its oversized drape and was beside myself at the proximity. My size tucked into his. The most delicious agonies have always come from an inability to ask for what I want. When I eventually made plans to leave the city, he asked if he could take my picture and I said no, absolutely not. No amount of compliments could justify the thing I first fell in love with being spoiled by my own image.
I remember being self-consciously fay, channeling the kind of precocious innocence that defined femininity in the aughts. Our naivety was genuine though, given how little we knew about where technology would (or would not) take us. Turns out the chance encounters were limited. On the blogs of the early 2000’s, a glimpse of someone’s face buried amongst an archive of words and curiosities was all we had to prepare ourselves for who we’d meet on the outside. But at least the conversation flowed. My breaches of internet to life were both twinkling and potentially minacious—some endeavours more foolish than others—but all considerably more exciting in their physical mystery than when the apps monopolised sexual interest. When the novelty of swipe-centred dating began in earnest, I would reuse the questions that were exchanged so much more poetically across message boards. Within the context of specifically sexualised encounters, no one was really up for the conversational challenge. Had I had access to years worth of my Tinder match’s internal monologues, I would have saved myself a lot of effort.
It’s absurd that sexual content took Tumblr down. That any service which encourages users to voice their thoughts would play the prude shows a shockingly limited understanding of human preoccupation. More-so, the codified flirtations saved on Tumblrs and Live Journals remain a novelty in our experience of digital communication thus far. The censor’s response to a platform of curated fantasies now feels laughably puritan. We’ve since learned that the internet insists on an increasing lack of subtlety, something that would have made the watchdogs blush just ten years ago. In comparison to contemporary media, the act of blogging felt like a method for maintaining some kind of sparkle. The arm’s length distance from the real thing more intriguing than any number of nudes. Though I admit that in search of a thrill, I sent my fair share of those too.
So much of the digital experience is about yearning. Lust and greed, yes, but also attempts at capturing a glow you know you can’t emanate forever. The internet capitalises on this instant nostalgia for ourselves, the art of remember when becoming increasingly accessible. I remember when I felt beguiling, powerful without the need to obviously eroticise my content. Now faced with endless streams of gym selfies and puckered lips, I don’t know how to do that anymore. Born from a culture that tantalised with the unexpected, my thirty-something year-old self remembers what it was like to be charmed, a kind of courtship that relied on more than self advertisement and memed platitudes. I believe that we all want to be known, but the tools we have at our disposal feel inadequate. Incapable of conveying the initial mystery. Overly literal. They lack the crucial element of surprise. Sometimes I sense the halo of this longing around a group of friends, the way we trace our respective romances with the language of lure, a gentle melancholy at the app’s most recently disappointing entrapment. No one denies that the hunt still titillates but what I recall most poignantly is the feeling of the heavy jacket around my shoulders. A sense memory for the warmth of another body I was too afraid to reach for. And the chance encounter of two dogs, in a park, in the rain.