Confessions One

If every name has a meaning, and every meaning a shell, molding a formless personality, so that Hope wishes eternal, Faith believes it will happen, and Dolores simply weeps, then mine should have been Stalky Stalkerina, or perhaps Pippa Tommygirl.

I am an incurable stalker of the grainy yet miasmic, disjointed world of bits and bytes in cyberspace. Friendster is my happy hunting ground, and anonymous browsing my veil of woven twigs. I can and will track down many, many people, and can spend great indigestible globules of time clicking, clicking, clicking, hovering like ghosts above the unsuspecting.

I am not picky – I will sight, through my dusty screen and hand-marked keyboard, just about anyone at all. I will winkle out that boy I liked in primary school, and the girl that he liked, just to see if she is still as pretty as she used to be. (Yes.) I will swim through profiles upon profiles, each a little slice of person that they want others to imagine is the whole. I will glut on the acres of cheesiness, sown with “i love u 4eva eva eva eva my darlingest piggyboo”s and many many many pictures of “my hunniebunnie and mE~!!”. I will, occasionally, be caught up in tangled elation and envy when I find someone much, much more interesting than I will ever be.

This, too, is possibly why I will, despite having a monthly tram/train/bus ticket, walk whenever and wherever possible. Otherwise it’s hard, you see, to slyly slide a sidelong glance to peek through windows and doorways, to throw out nets of hasty looks, catching puzzle pieces of different lives, yet fitting together, somehow.

There was the girl with coppered curls that turned brown under the Subway lights who ordered, without fail, two salads every day. One set of cutlery, two napkins, thanks. There was the small group I glimpsed, a wandering inkblot in the city in their long black clothes, gothic eye liner, drooping dark spikes of hair, and a startling smudge of black for lips.

There was once I walked down a road alone, and I saw a couple walking, sweetly hand in hand, when suddenly he lunged at her jacket zipper, yelling, (I lie not at all) “They need to be FREE!! FREE!! Set them FREE!!”

I’m not insane. Not really, anyway. It’s more like this: I have always had an insatiable, gnawing curiosity to know, to really, really know what it’s like to be someone else. To be that salad girl, or that lanky, smoking goth guy, to know how it is to have lived forever in a dimly-lit apartment, on a second-hand couch, faintly beery, to know how it’s like to have grown up wanting, wanting so much you don’t know what it’s like to have, to be that happy, carefree person who really doesn’t care, to be that man who meditates every day in the park, lying on the cold damp grass, to be that guy who walked, naked, into the sea in winter,  to be that woman, crumpled with age, who still wears her hat and pearls when she hobbles out in faded satin heels, to think what that girl is thinking, the quiet schoolgirl on the train whose uniform looks like it doesn’t quite fit, like her skin, like the trendiness of her ipod against the untrendiness of her.

In other words, to be anyone but me.

I wonder, sometimes, just where curiosity ends and desire begins.