Plaintext Storybook Romance
If you’ve ever been in love with a fictional person, it’s a lot like how it was in the early days of online dating.
What you really had were words, sometimes a small photograph, and just your imagination. It was pure and strange, connection through such limited mediums, and usually a lot of distance. What is it like in your part of the world? Is it daytime? When do you eat dinner? When do you get a break from school?
When are you going to email me back?
It was, oddly, born of a certain convenience. You would meet this person in a place where you both frequented, usually a white-background chat room or message board. A hangout for people who were a little more like you. And something catches your eye, maybe after a minute or a month. THAT person, they make me laugh. They seem smart, interesting. We talk the same, or we don’t. They’re RELEVANT. They become real, the sketch lines begin to form around them, separating them from the canvas. Through nothing but talk, they begin to exist. Details fill in about their mind at the same time as their face: They like living with their extended family instead of their parents. They enjoy going outside but are taking time to talk with you instead. They like pizza, but only thin crust, and everyone says they should eat more because they’re so skinny.
Little mysteries emerge and resolve every day, the imagination of a person. And before you can even know it, they’re on your mind… When you’re at dinner, when you’re lying in bed, when you aren’t talking to them which is decidedly rare; you’ve been glued to your keyboard for the past week or so. Sometimes a picture comes in, a scanned low-rez thing that is blurry and doesn’t show too much detail. But there they are, a person. They’re real, they must be. You know their middle name, the colors of their bedsheets… you find a way to sneak in long-distance phone calls to hear their voice.
There aren’t webcams, or microphones, or text messages. Just people sitting at a desk, hours apart, so fascinated with one another. And then one day you hear the words….
I love you.
This human mosaic has parts of a mirror in them… they show you how you really feel.
Then you share it.
Minutes away feel like hours.
Emails are long when schedules don’t line up. Instant message boxes carry your passion with it, and you imagine the rest. Blue eyes, I think…
You lay on the pillow and wonder how their neck smells.
You hold onto your own hand and wonder, rough or soft palms? Long fingers? Left or right handed?
You imagine them with you, the bits that you can piece together as best you can, and dream of it all. The fantasy of a surprise trip to their school, finding them among the masses, and smiling. The hope that they are around every corner, ready to sweep you into their arms and knit the little bits of art into something real and tangible. Not a quilt of creativity anymore, but real.
You ache to feel the pulse in their wrist as you hold hands.
To share lip balm and giggle. To see their room, and their clothes, and all the little details like visiting this fairy tale you had created for so long. Every detail is a treasure, helping you feel closer.
Pressing your lips to the same part of the letter they placed their own. Memorizing the handwriting, the words, the way the L curves as they write, “Love,…”
Love felt like longing. It felt like a ticklish ache. You went to bed with stories in your mind of how things might go, when you at last… met.
Someday years from then, a cologne or a candle reminds you of laying on your bed and thinking, my love might smell just like this. Even if it wasn’t true, in your mind they did. That was them, but more. It was the imagination of them.
Just a fragrance in the air, and you remember the storybook life you once had, built on little else but words.
