(c. 2005 - 2008)

When I couldn’t find a website, I would often find her, which judging by the mission architecture and soft golden light, puts her somewhere in California. You may have seen her too, Expired Domain Girl, most likely at her college campus between classes, the weight of Econ 101, Art History, and some granola on her shoulders. The trace of red on her backpack suggests an enrollment at Stanford, a fine university nuzzled in the south bay with Google, Apple, and other centers of the virtual world. Of course, she’s a model, though a “modest face” model; not a high society  model to make you feel bad, but one whose common features serve to ingratiate with the regular folk, meaning, you. Her blondness is “dirty blonde,” an odd phrase considering the assertions of Aryan purity, as if the sequence of her hair’s low- and high-lights is a slow corruption over time, the cross-breeding American Pâté of Europe’s liver. I’ve always found the benign placation of her half smile saying “sorry, that website is dead” arbitrary, yet prophetically sullen; for she too, now, is a thing of the past. I went searching for her, paradoxically looking for dead sites, hoping to come across her. In failure, I googled “expired domain girl” and found her, still there, the same locked pose, like a slice of inertia on a slide. I hope she got that B.A. or B.S., maybe then a Master’s or PhD. She probably has a ring on her finger, a more relaxed labia through which two craniums transgressed, and maybe a few wrinkles on her face. Her favorite painting in that 2 lbs. art history book is now a $25 print in her kitchen, which is how art is both beautiful and sad. Life happens like Proust: meaningful in theory, most of the time boring, and then we find out it was all gay. On my death bed, propped up with the bloated surrender flag of my last pillow, may my nurse look just a little like her. We’d talk about the weather, and she’d say it was nice out that day.