The funny thing about cyber stalking is you feel like you know a person you’ve never met. So when your ex walked in to order coffee, her face registered immediately. It was like finally being in the same room with the Mona Lisa after only ever seeing copies, like finally getting to observe the details up close when all you’ve heard is lecture after lecture after agonizing lecture, like breathing in a history you could only ever dream of participating in but could never touch. And when she smiled it certainly felt like something worth writing novels and screenplays and poems about. Maybe you thought it was Mona herself because you ran to hide the moment you saw her, but you always were one to run from things you can’t understand.
You know, they say that the portrait of Mona Lisa is the most parodied piece of art ever created. People are always trying to recapture the same magic. You have made a life of it. It’s like you went to Paris once and saw a smile, and you’ve been asking every face since to give you that same feeling. You can’t let go of the girl who sat for you, who posed just like you told her to until she got uncomfortable and decided to exist for something other than your admiration. So you keep dressing them up and telling them to sit where she sat and entreating them to give you a smile, and it all seems so romantic until the final stroke is made and the brush drops and you realize this isn’t the portrait you wanted. It’s just a parody.
Well, I was never one for doing what I’m told. I prefer to stand and not to sit, to dress myself with the colors of everything I am, to smile only when something is truly worthy of my delight. But I can understand how you made the mistake of thinking I would entertain your whims and reveries. I approached you with the timidness of someone who had long heard of your work, and I asked you to make me into something like a masterpiece too soon before learning you are just a copy artist. You tried, though - that’s the thing. You tried. And I thought all of your effort meant that it must be working, that the frame would finally fit, and that I would soon be admired by all whom you allowed to gaze in my direction. But I’ve never been to Paris.
So Mona Lisa smiled in my direction, not knowing that a few shorts months ago my face had been painted to look like hers, and you ran because you’ll never understand why she stopped smiling at you. She got her coffee to go because she never sticks around for long, and you wouldn’t love her if she did. Something hung in the air when she walked out. I think it was the thought that maybe she had never really been there in the first place, and maybe it was the thought that she had never really existed. The funny thing about cyber stalking is also the funny thing about art history text books. You spend all this time studying faces that you may never see in real life, and the thing is that you’d never know if they didn’t exist at all. So maybe you went to Paris, and maybe you didn’t. But I do know that you will never find the girl with the smile you thought you saw. She doesn’t exist.