I’m Sorry I Liked Your Photo From Two Years Ago, Yes I Am Stalking You

I wish there were a more cogent explanation for why I was randomly combing through your photos like a cat-covered bag lady at three in the morning the other night, but there isn’t. In fact, it’s quite lucky that I didn’t manage to accidentally “like” more of your posts and pictures from that era, even further illuminating just how much of a “creeping you” spiral I had gotten myself into while eating hot pockets and listening to mellow, hypnotic electronica. If I were being honest, literally every internet action you’ve taken between 2006-ish and today would have my thumbs up of terrifying approval, and you would realize that my dedicated monitoring of your online activities, past and present, are a sign of true love.

How often do I stalk you on Facebook? Ehh, often. I would pretend here that I’m not constantly clicking over to see what you’re up to and gauge the attractiveness of the various people you’ve been banging who cruelly aren’t me, but that’s what I like doing in my spare time. Some people crochet, some people scuba dive, I harvest pictures of you and show them to my friends like “OH MY GOD I am basically going to get pregnant through my laptop screen just looking at dem cheekbones.” It’s not weird if you understand that I am an anxious pile of incoherent mumbling when it comes to actually speaking to you in person. If you account for how incapable I am of carrying on anything resembling a normal conversation, come face-to-face time, my online activities are simply another way of communicating my wholesome affections!

And honestly, it’s kind of your fault for accepting my friend request in the first place. I mean, after all of the psyching-up it took to send you that request in the first place, all of the hours of agonizing over whether or not to extend that creepy internet hand of familiarity, you basically owe me my stalking time. What do you have hundreds of pictures of yourself for, if not to provide obsessive joy to the girl whose crush on you is beginning to border on the crippling? You are performing a public service, and keeping me off of the streets, where I would normally be hanging out in front of movie theaters, licking life-size posters of Tom Hardy and crying about how no one likes me.

The point is, creeping is a natural part of the internet ecosystem. I’m doing no real harm by being a strange lurker in the recess of your Facebook persona. So what if I amuse myself with a few hours of finding out what you were up to back in ’07? It’s not like I’m throwing bricks through your window with love notes written on them in blood. (Though, come to think of it, there is something vaguely romantic about that.) Just understand that every time you see my activity pop up from something that I have no viable reason to be looking at, it’s not because it popped up on the side of my news feed or some other absurd excuse. It’s because I love your face, and wanted to be around it for a little bit, and marvel at how hot it was back then and how much hotter it’s gotten. I like seeing the “before” and “after” slides of my crush. If that makes me wrong, well, I don’t want to be right.

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