We're Probably Getting Back Together Soon

My phone died this week. I’ve ordered a new one— I’d like to say I’ve enjoyed the silence, just lo-fi music playing, slipping into a flow state. But I’d be lying. Only a handful of friends to tell. Enough to register the tragedy of going off-grid like it’s 1503— where I imagine I’d be decent at throwing logs on a fire, but useless at hunting. No survival instinct. I get sentimental when it gets quiet. It's surprising that this is how I finally understand what Black Mirror really meant. Slick glass, dark and dead, reflecting back: smeared rectangle of myself slack-jawed, staring. Neither of us blinking— only one of us alive, allegedly. I’d had that phone since before the pandemic. It held more than my cache: its shape, my memory— my hand aches for its frictionless drag, but I had to get a replacement. I picked the same model, not out of loyalty, just me hoping it would backfill the imprint of its ancestor. I'm not too proud to admit I miss the constancy, companionship, the fugue-state afternoons given over to scrolling. I’ve been more alone than I expected. And lonelier still, realizing how much of me was never here to begin with. It's a disorienting false north, this gatherlessness; I'm still sitting with it. By the way, it's untrue news that tech is soulless— it's been up at least one mortal ever since my husband powered it on for me, a gift, ersatz affection in response to a lack of discretion he'd only recently admitted. And get this: apparently, I cry now. Despite half a life of spent convincing myself I’d therapized it out— that tears were just poorly timed girlish things I'd evicted due to their silencing effect. I was wrong, they were only hiding in the attic— turns out all this noise was just insulation from every soft place. Evenings with him feel longer. He’s older, closer to death than me. He’d hate that I said it. I won’t tell him. We’ve learned to steer clear of each other’s art. No rules about who we kill on the page. Best to leave it that way. I wonder if we'll go back to old habits. I think I already know answer. This screenless space hasn’t been clarifying— just absence, with no metaphor to cushion it. At the risk of repeating myself, I do know this: I miss her, Distraction—