Why I Unfollowed Alyssa Milano

Twitter can create the illusion of closeness. It’s easy to read a Tweet from Ashton Kutcher chatting about his lunch and think you are close to him in some way. You and 5 million other cozy friends.

I fell dead, deep, stupid in love with Alyssa Milano years ago. How on earth you can fall in love with someone you’ve never met, I don’t know. I suppose a therapist would say that I’d “idealized” love, and chosen some remote, safe, impossible epitome of love, free from any possibility of heartbreak. Which is, of course, exactly what I got.

I’ve been on Twitter for about 6 months I think. At first, I followed a few celebs just to get the feeling of the thing when someone from an old fan site of hers found me and told me she was on Twitter. I was following in 5 seconds. Amazingly, after a few weeks, she followed me back. I don’t really know how this happened, but you can imagine my delight. I promised not to geek out on her too much in a DM (direct message to you non-twitter users, only she and I could read), and things went along swimmingly for a while. Gradually, the reply tweets and even response DMs trailed off, then stopped altogether. In her final DM to me, in response to my asking if I’d said something wrong (don’t I sound like the pathetic guy in high school who just wouldn’t get a clue that you didn’t want to date him??), I got a terse response: “Been busy. Seldom check my DMs”. This is the Twitter equivalent of “I have to wash my hair tonight.” Alyssa follows almost exactly the same number of people I do. You have to follow a person in order for them to DM you. I get about 8 DMs a day. Pretty hard to miss.

In earlier days, when I’d first joined Twitter, she was open, unguarded, colloquial. But one could watch her follower count go up, literally by the minute, and as it did so, her tone became more reserved, official, distant. No longer a chat room, peer-to-peer network of any kind. She was now standing at a podium in front of a couple hundred thousand loyal faithful hanging at her every word. Her personal tweets virtually stopped. Her interaction with Twitter notables increased, however, most notably Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter whom she idolizes (probably because he early on ID’d her as a high end celebrity Twitter user. He’s no fool). I found myself suffering something of a heartbreak, and felt even more foolish than I had before.

Today, I unfollow her. A celebrity with 200 thousand followers who followed me, and I am unfollowing her. Most of her fans would think I’m insane. Last night, in a melancholy moment before signing off for the night, I wrote this:

Two words of endearment so casually spent,
Pliant, quiet, composed of light

I took them to heart, my heart spent their currency
And reflected the light of them harshly into a dark corner
Where there was no one to see the shimmer

The words, so impermanent, dimming, transient
I wanted to fix them to you like a brooch
You weren’t there. No one was.

A thousand million hearts at sea
Mine as small as a light bird trapped in the canopy
I want to own them, possess them – it’s not my choice
A random act of fondness lost

I run out of water before my boat has risen
Sitting in it, oar in hand, making the sign of the cross, the rose
I will, after time has passed, stand, rise, depart
And, leaving, curse the boat, not the water

Two words, misspent, like my errant youth
Two words, recalled, anonymously
Two words, released, relieved, retrieved
Two words, too quick to be believed
“Love you”


Above all, I think I am embarrassed. What a ridiculous old misanthrope. There is so much distance between the head and heart, though. The head knows too well the distorted logic I deployed throughout this. The heart, though, that lonely hunter, does not deal in logic. It was difficult to write this, to publish it. I am outing myself as a “celebrity stalker” of sorts, I guess, although it felt lot more real than that at one point. The lies we tell ourselves.


Just hit the unfollow button. There’s no fool like an old fool.

Later,
Jim