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—
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