“William, It Was Really Nothing”
Maybe one of cyberlife’s biggest jedi mind fucks is finding the thing you think is perfect for you, or the person that is seemingly perfect for you and it being just out of reach all the time, or incapable of leaping through your monitor and into your real life... What do you do then? Forget you ever wanted it in the first place? Piss and moan the next 2 weeks of your life away? Write a few terrible poems about your heartbreak and the sometimes purely theoretical nature of love. Post about it in your blog with veiled references to the traumatic break up via IM and some internet telePHONY service... (and yes I know where the accent goes on that sy-la-BBLE, my darling sweet Ted…) This love is the fake plastic trees in the garden of your heart love... Pretty and glossy and unfortunately the kind of fake you can make believe is real… I have seen some artificial flower arrangements that looked better than the real thing... It is attractive to have something that looks so real but requires so little and will last forever if you keep it out of direct sunlight…
So if the love was theoretical (Fake), is the heartbreak real or is it just some Ver.7.1 Heartbreak Lite? Is this anything Haagen Dazs or a new pair of shoes can help? How do you grieve a concept that felt like the real thing but never actually became a real thing? .. Spend the evening drinking cheap wine and photo shopping your individual head shots together at the grand canyon, then ceremoniously burning them??? Listening to Fiona Apple and smoking clove cigarettes can’t help you this time... and your friends in real life don’t wanna hear any shit about some internet boyfriends over the 3rd Thursday’s fondue...
Maybe these are practice loves, these unrequited sweet sorrows of the cyber lonely hearts clubs. Are we all emo cripples who can’t hack real life dating so we meet people online who live in the far reaches, beyond the boundaries of all that suck geographically or of course in the middle of some ‘real life’ drama with people far more important than you are?
Maybe we are just not ready for love in the real world. We need these practice loves and diluted heartaches to get our sissy asses ready for something not so abstract. Something shoes and ice cream can cure. Something that running into him at your local bar and him seeing you 5 pounds lighter wearing your new shoes can vindicate. Something that doesn’t leave you sticky in a long term abusive relationship with yourself…
In Absinthe Veritas,
Tallulah Crankhead
