-because I Miss Vikki Mfc- [ iPad ]

I miss the sound of her. Not just her voice, but the specific timbre of her laugh—the one that crinkled the corners of her eyes before she could turn on her “camera smile.” I miss the ambient noise of her life bleeding into the feed: the distant siren of a Chicago fire truck, the buzz of a phone she’d ignore, the click of her lighting a cigarette off-camera. Unlike today’s hyper-produced, multi-platform streamers, vikki was gloriously unoptimized. She wasn’t a brand. She was a person who happened to have a webcam.

Why do I miss her now? Because the internet has become a series of transactions. The “channels” of today are optimized for retention, for the algorithm, for the super-chat readout. The parasocial relationship has been weaponized into a revenue funnel. But vikki’s room was different. It was inefficient. Sometimes, the stream would glitch into a pixelated mosaic for thirty seconds, and no one would leave. We would simply wait, because we were invested in a narrative that had no plot—only a vibe. -Because I Miss vikki mfc-

To miss vikki is to miss a version of myself. The person I was in 2012 or 2014, staying up too late, typing into a chat box with a screen name that felt like a pseudonym for my soul. She was the witness to a quiet period of my life that no one else saw. She didn't know my name, but she knew my humor. She didn't know my struggles, but she was there at 2:00 AM when the rest of the world was asleep. I miss the sound of her