Hello I am currently sitting at Starbucks waiting for my dad to come pick me up after Anya’s surprise party and I have nothing to do because I left the book I’m reading (invisible man) in my other bag and so I’m just basically sitting here eavesdropping on the conversations around me. I definitely picked a very interesting place to sit; on one side of me is a twentysomething male stalking people’s Instagrams and on the other side are two twentysomething females discussing about a boyfriend named Himanshu, and also one of them’s getting a pep talk on How To Keep a Man.
I join the male on his stalking spree, not in the mood to hear about more Boy Drama than I am already embroiled in. On closer inspection, i see that he is not aimlessly scrolling through Instagram, but rather stalking one particular female on multiple social media platforms. First, he scrolls through her Instagram, watching all her highlights and stories and reading every caption, and at times fixating his gaze and closely inspecting some of the pictures in particular. I think she is probably his ex. The way he taps the laptop while trying to scroll through makes me believe that he feels great anguish at what he is seeing. I wonder what he really sees in her. She has about 30 posts, and all of them are just pictures of her in various outfits. Her feed is primarily composed of selfies and pictures of her face. Not very interesting, and certainly gets monotonous at times. Yet the way he scrolls through – at a very calculated pace, without a hint of surprise – gives me the impression that this is not the first time he is doing this. In fact, I get the feeling that he probably does this fairly often. oh, the pangs of unrequited love.
As I see him on that laptop, inspecting her Instagram like he’s getting paid for it, I wonder what their story is. Is she a new girl he’s slowly falling for? An old friend he suddenly sees something new in? An ex- girlfriend who treated him bad, but who he secretly still loves, despite it all?
Her username indicates that her name is Vandana. Vandana has tame, straight, short-to-medium length reddish-brown hair, the kind of eyes that say her boss probably loves her work ethic, and a penchant for yellow salwars. After he tires of her Instagram, he logs onto her LinkedIn profile. We learn that Vandana works in consulting. She works at one of those big companies with great employee benefits, and probably spends a lot of time at expensive five-star hotels. Vandana is a career woman. Is that why she can’t love him back the way he loves her?
After five minutes going through her linkedin, still behaving as if he’s following some sort of routine-check as part of his office job, he ends his stalking spree by googling her name.
When you google someone’s name, you normally don’t get too much information – maybe an Instagram profile, or a Pinterest, google+. Maybe a mention on a few websites. But Vandana is the sort of person, apparently, who’s whole life is scrawled over the Internet. There’s old pictures from her teenage years, a couple YouTube covers of songs that say a lot about the kind of person she is – Camila Cabello, Shawn Mendes, Alia Bhatt. He plays one of the YouTube videos, but he keeps the volume on mute. I think he just wants to see her move, and I don’t blame him. Vandana is one of those rare people who look even better when they’re not posing- when they’re alive and moving, their limbs acquire a new kind of human beauty. I can see what he sees in her. I finally can. After about three and a half minutes, the video ends, and Vandana smiles and waves into the camera. The male next to me can no longer stand it. He slams his laptop screen shut, gets up, leaves.
