Q

I don’t see faces my age anymore.

There weren’t many to begin with – but this time, it’s not a hyperbole. Everywhere I go, they have been reduced to the haunting silhouette of a crest and a nose, focused on their screens.

Those screens. They form a broken sea of blue-green all around me. Little markers of red and white bob in chilling synchrony.

For awhile I cared enough to be desperate: I sought to be seen. Let me be your Togepi, I screamed in my head, catch me the way you would Mew! But in this psychological gym battle, Pixels won. By far.

I’ve grown resigned to this life. I wander among the wrinkled and ludite, the past 30s. I take in the sky and the grass and the concrete as a strange on-behalf-of apology to nature. Overcompensating.

And then one day it happened.

Weaving through the mass of crest-nose-screen (I must be the most adroit human around, no one knew how to make way anymore), my gaze travelled from tarmac to grass to –

holy fuckeroni – human. eye. contact. Eyes that held as much desire as I knew was reflected in mine. Was this it? Have I finally found someone who gets it too?

In a dreamlike haze he made his way towards me, his face so visible it felt vaguely, embarrassingly, naked. And those hands, those blessedly empty hands. No flickering blue-green screen, no bobbing Pokeballs.

Now he was just a few feet from me, his eyes fixed and pleading. They were so captivating, I missed the first half of his appeal:

” – switch batteries, please! My phone die liao but got Onyx nearby!”