Missed Connections

Words spoken for the sake of sound,

Sound made for the sake of noise,

The mindless thoughts my mouth employs

Form circles under my eyeholes.

Dreaming your head on every neck,

I miss you like I miss myself

Plastic toys on a plastic shelf,

My skull is made of concrete.

It's all there on a silver plate,

The means to find my meaning,

The reason for my being,

But you, love, are still missing.

Posting ID: 4183843240 Posted: 2013-11-10, 6:57PM EST

At one time, nature was the main keeper of our secrets—the ocean swallowed bottled messages and erased sand-etched notes, while the trees retained the outlines of lovers’ names. Our spectrum of emotions eroded with the pebbles and sea shells, no chance of revival by anyone but the mud.

And if not nature, these emotions were transposed into notebooks, expressed through guitar notes or on canvases. Art is often the product of our incommunicable despair and solitude—that painfully human “forever empty,” in the words of comedian Louis C.K. Rhythms, colors, movements, and words are born out of our need to express and externalize our inner struggles. This artistic sharing of ourselves is one way in which we connect. It allows us to occupy the mental space of others, and in that process, to both dismantle the existence of an “other” and to reach new levels of our own mental space. We turn to art during our own moments of despair and it beautifully sympathizes, characterizes and relates.

But 2013 has connected us via abstract servers and networks, everyone operating within a few wavelengths of each other. A “solution” was invented to take away some of the pain of being a person, and it’s changing our age-old responses to dealing with the very essences of the human experience. The Internet has become this bottomless space of unknowable depth and connection—everyone’s platform—and it is flooding with graffiti like a massive bathroom stall with infinite clean space and Sharpies.

The Internet creates limitless and unknown opportunities for us to connect. And it is perhaps our understanding of this potential that further isolates us, allowing us to retreat from the world of natural human collision—to close ourselves off from the other moving and breathing humans—and to depend on severed technology to feel belonging.

Craigslist Missed Connections are written to impossible love interests, in lament of the loss of a familiar lover, to potential lovers. Some are rants, some are simple descriptions, some are highly explicit. They are pensive, lonely, drunken, searching, and almost always hopeful, finding romantic magic in the fabric of the daily grind. Hundreds are posted a day, allowing temporary intimacy with total strangers through longing and uncertainty.

“We both got on at Union Square and off at Bedford stop. We faced each other in a very crowed train. You had a great smile and your right middle ear pierced. We made eye contact a few times. I wish I would have said hi.”

*** 

Usually it’s the small hours of the night that ignite our primal instability. Everything is lonely at 2am. Reverberations are sent into cyberspace—waves of loneliness. Maybe they will disappear amidst a stream of other missed connections. But maybe they will resonate on the same frequency as someone else’s lonely 2am wave.

You’re walking through Central Park or down Broadway, traveling uptown on the 6 train, or drudging through an endless Trader Joe’s line on a Friday night. In New York, solitude is a badge of honor, and people dance around one another along seemingly intentional paths steadied by existing commitments and communities. You are constantly surrounded by a world of people—a superficial intimacy that only heightens your own incomprehensible isolation. 

A single stranger emerges among the sea of strangers. Maybe it’s a classic beauty or a striking expression or a neon shirt that catches your eye. But before you know it, your hesitant glances lock and for a moment, your mutual loneliness intertwines—it comes together in a fleeting, powerful recognition of your collective disorientation. And then it’s gone. Attention is funneled elsewhere—to the approaching subway stop or the pulled pork at the sample station or the Lexus blasting Notorious B.I.G., cheap subwoofers bouncing the rear like a boat caught on choppy waters. The moment that transpired, or at least the moment that was imagined, is lost. The potential connection missed, left unacknowledged, and with it, all hope for finding an answer to the isolation.

Until early or late, when the loneliness relapses, this time coupled with a spark of possibility. There’s a platform to express these daily missed connections—a virtual space to commune over what could have been. It exists to give you a seedling of hope for connection at your most lonely—a sort of counter intent, leading you along a pretext of connection to a lost road of further disconnection. The cold fluorescent light of your laptop bounces around the room, and as your fingers hover over the keyboard, you relive the moment, extrapolating significance in attempt to halt that brooding, unidentifiable longing. “This past weekend, enjoying late summer weather in Long Beach, our eyes locked and I felt that fabled trembling in the knees, heart-in-my-mouth, butterflies-in-my-belly moment.”

At first glance, the posts often seem mundane and empty—subway one-liners devoid of substance and relegated to superficiality. “You were wearing cheetah print pants, I was wearing Pumas. I’ve never posted before, but thought you were cute. Hope you see this.” But perhaps it’s the banality of these passing thoughts that make them so human. In their triteness, these wandering desires seem to carry a deeper sense of disconnect that is so often experienced by city dwellers. There are so many people, and therefore so much filtering, that the sense of isolation and lack of connection seems very real. New York City statistics even support this: a greater percentage of people live alone in New York than in any other place in the country. The crowd can feel empty, with identifiable community lost in anonymity.

Posts exist in detached cyberspace—thousands of people floating through life without communities, grounding, or tethers. But maybe it’s this collection of such disconnection that we’re attracted to. Even if the connection was missed in the moment, the post is released to a network of other hopeful searchers, and this aimless hope creates its own sort of community. It is a community comprised of hundreds—thousands—of people looking for something more. If Cheetah Print Pants doesn’t see Puma’s post, someone else inevitably will. Even if Puma’s post sits in stagnation for a week before being forever deleted, maybe it had a momentary resonance with someone else’s sense of missed opportunity.

But as easy as it is to read desperate solitude and loneliness into every post, sometimes the primary motivation is just an appendage of vanity. “I think when I look at missed connections, I’m looking for me,” said a Missed Connections user in response to an NYU media study of the network. Perhaps it’s just a light-hearted narcissism that leads us to the throng of postings. After all, if one half of a missed connection passed undetected, surely it could be excavated with some innocent Craigslist perusing. Another visitor of the site said, “I read missed connections too, for entertainment, and for the slim chance someone spotted me on the train and thought I was the most beautiful thing in the world. They are like little love stories.” Beyond that, posting requires a certain vain hope that someone will be on the receiving end, acknowledging and looking to reclaim the moment. Maybe we are always searching for a piece of ourselves—even in the alternate and imaginary lives that play out in our minds.

“We work at the same place. The fact that we are also both married makes it even more risky to approach you. But I sense we are attracted to each other. If I knew you would be open to something discreet I would go for it because I do sense that we would be very hot together.”

The heft of potential can be a tricky thing to categorize. A Missed Connections post, and by extension, its accompanying expectations, maybe aren’t as heavy or as damaging as the Luddite wants to believe. One user didn’t hear from his missed connection and doubts he will. “I have never posted before and don’t know if this works or not, but just took a chance for the good,” he said. Another user, who claimed to have had three missed connections all in one night and all on McDougal Street, also admitted that although he didn’t expect to hear back, “it was worth a try lol.” Most seem to enter the Craigslist world without inflated expectations, but with a hint of potential—if not for the external connection, then for attaining some greater level of connectivity with the self.

The Oxford dictionary defines masturbation as the “[stimulation of] one’s own genitals for sexual pleasure.” On some level, Craigslist Missed Connections is the same idea—a stimulation of the imagination for a brief sense of romantic fulfillment. We are not fully feeling or fully depriving, existing in a state that never quite touches vitality or anguish. And the Internet is our beloved enabler and our master, reducing us to our cheetah pants and fleeting glances on falling corners of cyberspace, changing the depth of our interactions, and providing an all too convenient escape from the challenges of relationships.

Or could we just be reflating the skeletons of our imaginations, allowing the magic that exists in our minds to play out in its most genuine form, a practice that may be lonely, but is also liberating and remarkably, fundamentally human? Bits and pieces of ourselves are brought to and from cyberspace, perhaps flattened and compressed to fit the virtual medium, but then resurrected—through sharing and externalization—rounded and reshaped. This is a job for the imagination and for the heart, and although some may be suffocated by the platform, we all have the power to determine our level of devotion to the digital world. Our breathing bodies will never disappear into a chat box and Facebook will never be powerful enough to deteriorate our biological attachments, for humans will always find new ways to stay human.