January 28th
Instagram. January 4th. I posted two photos from attending a high school dance with a girl, he posts his folks [IG] and a photo of his first time in drag [IG] matching the basic color scheme of each. [IG]
February – March
Emails between us about botox, addiction, and secrets.
April 2nd
Three months prior, I post Mutual Friend at a diner, his face in profile [IG]
the same day I post this comic book poster at WFMU [IG]
which leads Stefan to Mutual Friend in profile at Quimby’s Comics store during our trip to Chicago [flickr]
Right beside it, is this photo of plush fetuses hanging in the comic store window. [flickr]
So Stefan draws a fetus. [IG]
Two weeks earlier to Mutual Friend, I’d posted this photo of disco fries at a diner [IG]
which Stefan uses as inspiration for womb tissue.
May 10th
June 4th-28th
We chat about a sweep in Paterson, family woes, and zombies.
June 8th
I post an Easter throwback photo two months prior. [IG]
He reposts his old self portrait with bunny ears. [IG]
June 12th
Seattle Erotic Art Festival. [flickr]
uploaded six days apart [IG]
June 28th
One week prior, June 13th, I post images from a NYC wedding, Stefan combines her pose and his expression while he airbrushes zombies. [IG]
More photos from the NYC wedding [fb]
The woman in his photo with the same facial piercing as the woman in mine.
He combines my photos, copying her knowing side eye. [IG]
(he looks so painfully sad)
and adds elements of SEAF one month prior, from which I was still uploading photos. [IG] His badge at the same angle as the SEAF sign.
My selfie from one month prior, having moved in with the boyfriend and sitting in the back yard. [IG] His Walking Dead selfie. [IG]
July 6th
June 3rd I posted this selfie [fb] from the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival, filled with fetishism.
Stefan posts a tattoo of Pinhead, crops his face in half like my shadowed self, tweaks the colors to match my outfit and the wall behind me. [fb]
This is the only time Stefan posted his tattoo work to his social media.
July – August
Emails ranging from living a double life, to gender confusion to cancer.
September 2nd
Three days prior [IG]
One week prior [IG]
which together lead Stefan to this old self portrait from 2004. [flickr]
Stefan combines them.
He calls this “removable graffiti” and sticks it on metal outside a brown building.
Four months prior in April I posted this, on my hand a sticker matching his mask in color, a background of a brown building and AC units.
“A little girl walking by with her Daddy saw me sitting on my stoop, stopped to say hello, and gave me a sticker! :D”
September 20th
We email about kittens and parents.
September 24th
An unfinished 2010 drawing of mine.
Hidden love.
(It becomes more evident over time, but Stefan clearly has all my photography and art saved in his brilliant visual mind, filed in collections of obsessive association.)
October 5th
June, I post photos from my mom’s house, showing her painting with a green background [IG]. Stefan posts a painting of Linda Blair in the Exorcist by his father. [fb]
October 7th-18th
We speak of Halloween season.
November 8th
This same day I post my comic book haul from Chiller. [IG]
Below it, an image of my childhood photos uploaded one week prior. [IG]
He adds a toy body with comic book expressions to an older drawing, makes sure to leave some diagonal tile and thigh behind and uncropped, like the askew pile of comics and poorly framed photos. [fb]
November 9th
From June, the cake at the NYC wedding I’d attended. [flickr]
His caption: “A gelatinous tale.” Gelatin is used to make shiny glazes for cakes. I suspect the theme is due to my boyfriend reading our emails, suspicious of our contact. I’d repeatedly invited Stefan by to hang out with the kittens I had rescued, so there’s a puppy. [IG]
It’s a wedding, so you get a house with a white picket fence and a dog, the dots of blood becoming fruit, the knot on the wood behind the cake becoming a tree, the arcs on the cake design becoming tree branches.
The four tined fork makes the fence, the reflection of cake ball-decor against the knife makes the fence slats with nails, the cake server with reflections of red makes the bush.
November 8th-11th
We speak of vet bills and comic books.
November 11th
He started redrawing our comic book Romance From Beyond [fb]
…and used, as reference, a gory photograph I’d saved to my phone that was auto-uploaded to flickr.
November 14th
The wedding where this cake was served
also had a fire dancer. [flickr]
Which leads him back to the fire dancer I’d photographed in 2012
And the drawing he’d done based on those photographs.
So he now colors it like the cake creatures.
Shiny fire dancers. [IG]
November 15th-2oth
We email about comics, drawing, sex, and seizures.
November 23rd
Recent [IG] posts:
Stefan takes it all and turns it into a mashup magazine cover. [fb]
Again with the old Easter photos. [IG]
[fb]
November 25th
A month of my (mostly unanswered) poking in-between our phonecalls.
December 26th
A photo from December 22nd of my cats in a circle [fb] combined with earlier photos of kittens with goopy eyes become a Disney fever dream. [fb]
December 27th-29th
Trying to get Stefan to come out, talking about color.