Date: Tuesday, August 5, 2025
Mood: Electric
Music: Hey There Delilah by Plain White T's
Dear Richard,
I was at the airport today, picking up Levi’s mother. I watched a teenage girl sitting on her suitcase, holding her phone up, Facetiming a boy. The image on her screen was crystal clear. No lag. No freezing. She was showing him her coffee, laughing, treating the miracle of real-time video like it was air.
She has no idea.
I’m thinking about the webcam days. 2007.
Do you remember the setup? I had that bulky beige monitor that took up half my desk in Rochester. You had that cheap external webcam clipped to the top of your laptop in Cincinnati.
We lived for that notification sound. That three-note chime that meant you were online.
My heart used to hammer against my ribs every single time. It sounds foolish now—a grown man, a father of three, getting butterflies like a schoolboy because a little yellow icon turned green. But that icon was my lifeline.
We didn't have high definition. I fell in love with a version of you that was made of giant, blocky pixels. The audio would cut out every ten seconds. The video would freeze with your mouth open in mid-sentence.
But it didn't matter. It was the intimacy of the dark hours.
We were both putting our kids to bed, pretending to be straight dads to the outside world, and then rushing to our computers to finally be us.
We talked about everything. That’s what I miss the most, I think. Because we couldn't touch, we had to talk. We spent hundreds of hours dissecting our failed marriages, our fears about coming out, our terror that we were damaging our children.
I remember one night specifically. It must have been 3:00 AM. I had work the next morning, and you had an early class, but neither of us could sign off. You were whispering because your kids were asleep down the hall.
"I feel like I’m waiting for my life to start," you said. The audio crackled, but I heard the break in your voice.
"I’m coming," I promised you. "Just wait. I’m coming."
And the sexual tension... God. It was agonizing. Trying to be intimate over a choppy internet connection, trying to show each other our bodies in the blue glow of the monitor. It was clumsy and desperate, but it was the hottest thing I had ever experienced because it was you. It was the Forbidden Fruit, digitized.
We were building a world in the ether. We were two guys in the Rust Belt who found the only other person on earth who understood the specific weight of our baggage.
Levi Facetimed me yesterday from the grocery store. He wanted to know if we needed almond milk or oat milk. The connection was perfect. The image was sharp. It was domestic. It was easy.
But I found myself missing the grain. I missed the lag. I missed the desperate, breathless feeling of waiting for your video to buffer, just so I could see you smile.
We fell in love in the dark, Richard, lit only by the screen. And when I finally drove to Cincinnati and touched you for real, it felt like I was touching a celebrity.
I hope you still stay up late talking to someone. I hope you found someone worth losing sleep over.
Love always,
Taylor