I looked at my phone and thought, i’d rather never fuck again than reply to this message. I contemplated sending a reply saying that I’m over being online but instead I went to a party and told everyone that I wasn’t dating online because fostering relationships solely over the internet was an example of late capitalism turning our lives into extensions of our working days.
I sipped my wine and thought about telling people that I was in love with a) the girl from the bar called Angelica, b) a woman who I was waiting on to leave her husband, c) a catholic priest, d) Meryl Streep as Julia Childs, e) the mechanic or maybe f) the plumber.
I looked over at my friends, dancing without jackets, and knew that they would know it wasn’t true. They would know because each month I sent out a text to them commemorating the last day someone put something in me and each month they’d reply with some variation of I'm sorry. I went to the fridge and wondered if they were sorry that I hadn’t fucked or sorry that I had typed it into the internet.
***
I flicked from an interview between two writers about being online to my phone notes, typing furiously that they somehow knew how to be online and wondering why everyone is all of a sudden talking, writing, and obsessing over the internet. The concrete walls of the city loop sped past the window of the train as I seethed over the writers in the interview, especially the one that I followed. I envied that his writing was an extension of what he put into the void (or vice versa). He seemed like the most put together person with a single string of creative work that unspooled across platforms and under titles. How would we know what came first out of the pithy tweets or the taut fiction?
I looked up at a man sitting across from me and wondered about the things the internet had on him. I wondered what his online aesthetic would look like if we compiled everything that he was ashamed of into a well designed monthly newsletter. Mine would consist solely of a large rubber fist shaped from the hand of a man I met in an online writing workshop.
***
I texted my friends to say that someone had put something in me and they said congratulations. I lied when one of them asked if it was the man from the writing workshop. I told her that it was someone from an app and hoped that she didn’t remember what I said about dating online.
The man from the writing group was different in real life. He had cut his hair which made him look like a little boy when he took his glasses off to fuck. When he was still online I had thought about his hand inside of me when I came. He would open and close his fist in time with my spasm and I had imagined it as complete ecstasy. When he first put his fingers inside me I thought about reaching for my phone to send him a text to ask for the things that I wanted but instead, I closed my eyes. He put his glasses back on and got up from my bed to dress. I asked if he would read my work but he left without answering.
***
I deleted elements of myself online for enlightenment. My friends asked why and I said, that nothing actually happens online.
***
I wanted to write a story about the aesthetic choices of being online but I could only return to the man that I wished was a rubber fist. I wanted to send him something but I’d lost his contact in the cleansing of my online presence. I wondered if he used the internet as an extension of his creative practice or if he too felt locked out by an inability to reproduce the current online aesthetic.
I sat down to write and all that came out was an anecdote about never wanting to fuck again. My desire to never be seen again and be looked at forever competed so I took a photo of my pussy on a disposable camera. I imagined that one day I would bump into the fist man on the street where I would slip it into his pocket and he would stare at it in awe but never know it was me. I didn’t have the photo on me when I saw him in a bar. He asked if I wanted to go back to his house and I left my friends to walk five hundred metres in the rain to fornicate. When I was leaving I asked if he would read my work and he put his email address into my phone.
***
I heard a knock at the door and went downstairs to find my housemate talking to the man from the writing group. I asked why he was here and he said that I had called the night before. I had wanted to talk about my writing. My housemate had been keeping me up to date on internet trends because she was worried that people would think I was weird or old. The latest was adding the feminine urge to the beginning of your sentence and as she walked away she added it to a sentence that I didn’t quite catch.
I sat at my desk and he sat on the edge of my bed. I told him I was writing a short story about being online. I began to read out loud but he interrupted and asked if he could just read it off my computer instead. After he finished he came and sat next to me on the bed and played with my nipple through my shirt. I asked him what he thought of the story and he sighed, rolled his eyes, and said I didn’t reply because you never sent it. If this was real memoir then you would have written what I did say when you sent it to me which was that I thought it was great and asked if I was in this? But instead, you imagine me saying “Who cares if you don’t get the internet? Who cares about the “aesthetic choices of being online?”.” And before I could answer the imaginary man had put his cock in my hand and we were making out on my bed.
Zara Gudnason is the founding editor of this here newsletter.