Ordinary people here are leaving for some prosaic nearby destination, seeing aunts or cousins, or applying for some mindless job, like gluing wires on a thousand printed circuit boards, to earn enough to live on day by day.
But this boy only looks with longing across the horizon, and beyond;
No one is expecting him, and he has no purpose here; he only feels the distance calling to him like an unfinished song.
He lives in present time: he has a cell phone with a camera, a nearby internet café. He uses Facebook, Friendster, Twitter; he has a thousand “friends” to check on, other boys and girls who text him every hour, every minute, just to ask him what he’s doing, what he’s thinking, what he’s eating, where he’s going, where he went.
On the cafe screen he is: a grand prix driver in Australia, a champion golfer in America, a brave guerilla in the mountains, a gangster on the empty streets of some horrendous slum in East L.A.
And he can see the world- videos from any country, all the popular attractions, all the far-flung strange locations, freezing mountains, burning deserts, all of nature in detail and in perfect resolution, bugs and birds and leaping whales… And there’s digital romance- anything he can imagine, any story, any style, whispering softly in his headphones, a teenage girl deep in love…
But not with him. And not with anyone. The girl breaks up, fades, the screen goes black. The ceiling lights come on, he looks around and sees a dull and dingy empty room, and row on row of keyboards, empty monitors and empty chairs. The people have all left. The last one left is him. This is real. And he’s alone.
All the hours he has spent here, all the mornings, afternoons- have been focused on a screen as thin as paper: blinking lights pretending to be space and time; faces of people he will never really see, or touch, or talk to; electronic images that smile- and call themselves his friends.
Virtual Reality. And none of it is really real; it’s just a dream from which he wakes, to find himself beside a small blank television set, groggy and dissatisfied. He really needs to go outside for air.
And here we see him, standing by the sea, searching the real horizon in real time, longing for a real life.
