Come, gather round my picture. Let me tell you a story. You're attracted to me, aren't you? The seconds go by and you're still studying my features and imagining the body hidden from sight. You little devils! You don't have to admit to anything. It will be our personal secret. But I wanted to tell you a story. A story of the destiny of one who found my photo in the vast labyrythal synapses of the Internet. He looked into my static eyes - yes - I know I'm a digital photo and that my eyes and all the rest of me are static, unchanging. I can live with that. If I am not evolving, at least everything around me is. And that is fascinating. When the collective pixels of my gaze met the searching eyes of my finder, something happened to him. It would be a cliché to say he fell in love with me at first sight, but he seems to be the clichéd type, and that's exactly what his passions forced upon him. Before that moment ended he stood up, began pacing nervously up and down his room, then pushed against the door and stepped into the world in search of me. He boarded a bus, gambling that the increased mobility would necessarily assist our paths in intersecting. It won't. Maybe it will? But first his face will have grown gaunt and haggard from this tedious turning from face to face, wherever he encounters the features of a girl, a hope ending each time in disappointment. His eyes are darting about right now from side to side desperate for the brief respite of someone potentially me. Where he is? He's already drifted further from his point of origin than he could ever hope to recover in a week's journey by the same buses. That's really it - the story, I mean. It will end eventually in some tragedy, when his money runs out, when his credit cards cease to function, when he no longer remembers who he is. I can already see clouds of panic forming in his eyes at this very moment. How do I know that when I'm here with you? He printed me out on a scrap of paper, and looks at me when no one else is around.

Story #296