A Bizarre Affair

I think we all go through weird, brief personal episodes in our lives, flights of fancy that often can’t be explained, or perhaps don’t make sense, even to ourselves. I say that because I have an odd one going on now. I thought about describing it to my best girlfriend, but I don’t think she’d understand. It’s too crazy even for her. Then I thought about telling my brother. He would understand, but he would worry about me. He would be afraid I would be on the verge of venturing off into the abyss. Then I thought, How about my blog at City Data. I can unload my idiocy there and few will read it, and no one will tell. So here I am.

It all began when I went to a Facebook page on Saturday. I don’t have many Facebook “Friends” relative to other Facebook subscribers, but I have some. I think the actual count is about forty. Anyway, I visited the Facebook page of one of my high school ex-classmates and began looking through her list of Facebook friends. I was just being curious more than anything. Well, as I was going down through the photos of her Facebook friends, I came upon the picture of this handsome guy. He was looking right at me from his small profile photograph, a perfect smile on his face. His name is Jeff.

I clicked on Jeff’s photo and was instantly transferred to his Facebook homepage. It was as if I had broken into the house of an unknown man. He had installed the Facebook “timeline” feature and had seemingly put some effort into it as far as listing his life events. I quickly scrolled down to its bottom, to Jeff’s earliest days. It seemed he had been born in 1974. I quickly calculated his age, then instantly compared it to my own age of 27. I subtracted the difference. There were a few years in between us, but I’ve always been a sucker for older men. As loony as it must sound, I was hoping that our slight age difference would not bother Jeff. And I know that [I]does [/I]sound loony. That’s why I’m telling the blog and no one else.

I scrolled up the timeline and found an old photo of Jeff, a diploma in his hand, graduating from high school. He was a good-looking guy, if not a bit boyish at that point in his life. I moved up through the timeline’s years. I discovered that Jeff graduated from the University of Utah in 1996. Apparently he is not an idiot. Again I moved up his Facebook timeline. There was no evidence of any marriage or children, either a current marriage, or a past one. God help me, I actually felt pleased. Can you see where this is going?

I started clicking into Jeff’s photos. He had a lot of them. Perhaps a hundred or more. I began with a group of photos featuring Jeff and an attractive woman in what appeared to be an afternoon spent with two other couples at a beach. In a few of the photos the woman was smiling and hanging onto Jeff’s arm, in one or two other pictures the pair was sitting happily side by side on a blanket. I cannot deny I felt a burst of jealousy. Thankfully she did not appear in any pictures taken on any other day. I chalked her up as a fling, a short-term romance.

I was thrilled to see photos of Jeff in hiking gear standing next to a wooden trail sign. He may not be an avid hiker as I am, but at least he goes into the great outdoors on occasion. I found photos of Jeff clearly enjoying several different parties. And of course there were a number of photos of him with his relatives.

In virtually all of these photos Jeff looked to be in a good mood. All the photos said that he is a good-natured, heterosexual guy. And of course he was devastatingly handsome in almost all the pictures. In only a few of the photos did Jeff not look terrific, and in those he was making comic faces or was caught in mid blink.

I quickly ran through most of his photos and then went through them again, the second time more slowly. As I went along, each photo seemed to be drawing me in a little further. It was as though the pictures were sips of wine and I was becoming ever more intoxicated as I proceeded. I imaged Jeff joking with me and making me laugh. I fantasized that the two of us were in some quiet cafe, this handsome man saying tender things to me in a sexy, gentle voice. I spent well over two hours looking at Jeff’s photos, well over two hours becoming mesmerized. It was way past midnight before I was able to turn off the computer.

The next morning I got up and immediately went back to the computer and clicked to Jeff’s Facebook homepage. I began going through the photos all over again. After five or ten minutes I discovered that I could view the photos “full screen”, so that’s that I did. He seemed even more handsome enlarged. In one of the photographs Jeff was particularly striking. I clicked on the picture and saved it to my hard drive. Then, a few photos later, another went to my computer’s hard drive, then another, and another. I finally was able to pull myself away and shut down my computer, but it definitely took some willpower.

During the day I hiked at the Trigo Wilderness and analyzed my behavior as I trekked along. I figured I did have control of myself, but I was clearly infatuated with a man who I knew only through photos. I told myself that Jeff was probably an okay guy but not the man I was imagining. Realistically, I knew that no guy could be the guy I was imagining. Jeff was, in essence, a dream, a dream created by a collection of photographs. I concluded that he was the result of a bit if loneliness mixed with a dash of horniness. It made for a powerful dream, a dream that wore the face of a handsome stranger.[COLOR=#000000]
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