Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Camille Laurens

What makes you more anxious is when the green light says “mobile.” Mobile, don’t you see?! Mobile means on the move, roaming, free ! By definition, harder to situate. He could be anywhere with his phone. Still, you know what he’s doing, or at least you feel you do— and this creates a sort of proximity which has a calming effect. You reckon that if he was enjoying what he was doing he wouldn’t be going online every ten minutes. Maybe he’s watching you too, hiding behind the wall and watching what you’re doing? Kids spying on each other. You listen to the same songs as him, almost in real time, you live together through music, you even dance to the same songs that get him tapping his feet. And when he’s not there, you have a record of when he was last online. You know what time he woke up, for example, because looking at his wall seems to be the first thing he does. At what point in the day he laid eyes on a photo he commented on. Whether he woke in the middle of the night. He doesn’t even need to say so. Basically, you’re stitching this together as you go along: you embroider over the gaps, like darning socks. There’s a good reason for calling it the Web. One minute you’re a spider, the next you’re a fly. But you exist for each other, thanks to each other, connected by a shared religion. Not exactly taking communion, but communing. Of course it hurts too, of course it does: the other person’s online, but not with you. You can imagine

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