Meet Me Offline

Jan. 13, 2012

By Stephanie Georgopulos 

Meet me offline tonight, ‘cause a 73 x 73 thumbnail isn’t enough you. I want you in the highest resolution, in four dimensions, the only way I know how to look at something beautiful. You weren’t made for the screen you know, and neither was the broken skin where you cut yourself shaving and the almost-invisible hairs that paint the corners of your upper lip and that one crooked eyelash that bends at a 45-degree angle. Who was foolish enough to think they could squeeze everything noteworthy about you into an avatar? You’re too pretty for pixels.

Put up an away message and let’s go away, somewhere we can power down and still feel electric, somewhere that doesn’t need password protecting. Let’s lose ourselves and find ourselves in a place with no Yelp reviews, no Google results, no Foursquare check-ins. The distance between your eyes and mine is uncharted territory, that’s a good place to start. Let’s look there first.

Tonight, I want to push all of your buttons except the one that says Like. I want to eat too slowly and argue over Tim Burton’s best film and take your mother’s side; I want you to look at me like you want to strangle me or kiss me or both and maybe then I’ll undo a couple of your buttons or my buttons and how’s that for a notification? I want to be the one to alert you.

Sign off and log out and shut down so we can meet up and go out and get high on fingers touching fingers and tongues pressing tongues instead of fingers pressing buttons. What I want to give to you is too large to attach, what I want to give to you can’t be uploaded or emailed or right-click-saved. Meet me so that we can remember how to connect without a router and a modem and a satellite, do it so that we don’t forget.

Just unplug for a while, ‘cause I can’t download the space between your shoulder blades and I need your back in my hands to remember how bodies work. I want to relearn your skin with an open palm, not a single finger, you know what I mean? ‘Cause what I mean is I want to touch you, not Poke you; I want to like you, not Like you; I want to love you, not Heart you. I want to live in a place void of scare quotes, of capitalized letters that inject semantics, a place void of tonal ambiguity. I want to live in a place where the space between your back exists, where it’s wire-less and not wireless, a place where I can like you in lowercase. Let me like you