At 4:03 in the morning, I am sitting on the toilet reading about Susan’s marriage.
This is not why I came into the bathroom.
Susan has written eleven paragraphs about gratitude, divine timing, choosing each other every day, and something called doing the work. There are photographs. Susan and Mark touching foreheads in a field. Susan and Mark holding wineglasses near a body of water. Susan laughing at something Mark has presumably said, although Mark does not appear to be speaking.
I haven’t talked to Susan since 2009.
I know Mark cheated in 2021.
This information has nowhere useful to live, so my brain has apparently stored it beside multiplication tables, old phone numbers, and the lyrics to songs I don’t even like.
The sadness is immediate and disproportionate. I have never met this dog. Nevertheless, there was Baxter wearing a Christmas bow in 2018, Baxter muddy beside a camper in 2022, Baxter recently gray around the muzzle, and now Baxter has crossed the rainbow bridge.
I cry on the toilet at 4:11 a.m.
Then accidentally laugh because directly underneath Baxter’s obituary is a video of a raccoon stealing an entire rotisserie chicken.
This feels morally incorrect.
By 4:26 I am back in bed, lying sideways because apparently changing rooms constitutes progress.
With what, Linda does not say.
Some people don’t deserve you.
Linda reacts with a heart to this.
I know I should keep scrolling.
This leads to Linda’s daughter, Linda’s daughter’s boyfriend, the boyfriend’s mother, and eventually, through mechanisms unavailable to conventional cartography, to a photograph from August 2017 of a man named Todd holding a largemouth bass.
I wonder if Todd is still happy.
Nobody decides to investigate Todd.
By 5:07, I know Todd has two grandchildren, once owned a motorcycle, dislikes property taxes, grills frequently, and has not changed his profile picture since Easter.
There is a peculiar feeling for this, though nobody teaches it in school: the sudden awareness that one has wandered several rooms deep into a stranger’s life and should probably begin backing out quietly.
Then accidentally click Todd’s wife.
At 6:47, coffee is discovered cold beside the toaster.
Somewhere between those two events, Melanie went to Cancun.
Melanie looks incredible.
I enlarge the photograph.
I don’t like noticing this.
Something small and prehistoric moves inside me, that involuntary contraction when somebody else’s happiness briefly feels like evidence against my own.
I immediately attempt to become spiritually superior to it.
Good for Melanie, I think.
At 7:02, I post a photograph of my coffee.
It takes nine photographs to produce the appearance of spontaneous coffee.
Slow morning. ☕️ Grateful.
I am neither slow nor particularly grateful.
I put the phone facedown because I do not care.
I pick it back up because perhaps Facebook had not refreshed.
At 8:36, I am standing in front of the refrigerator holding the door open.
My phone is in my other hand.
Someone from high school has become a life coach.
This is surprising because I distinctly remember this person throwing a desk.
An advertisement appears for a supplement promising to eliminate something I hadn’t known was wrong with me.
Now Facebook would like me to consider my gut.
I had not been considering my gut.
My gut has entered the conversation anyway.
Next comes a bra, a chainsaw, an adjustable bed, a commemorative coin, compression socks, and a device resembling something either NASA or a gynecologist misplaced.
I become briefly convinced the phone is listening.
I say aloud, experimentally,
Suggested for you: 17 Reasons Alpacas Make Surprisingly Good Pets.
The screen knows what it did.
At 10:18, I type a comment beneath a political post.
Measured. Devastating. Historically informed.
I remove one sentence because it sounds hostile.
I add it back because hostility seems warranted.
I delete the entire comment.
For several seconds I experience the uncommon tranquility produced by winning an argument nobody knows occurred.
A meme about husbands loading dishwashers incorrectly.
A recipe involving cream cheese.
The human nervous system was perhaps not designed for this arrangement.
Grief, mozzarella, outrage, nostalgia, death, banana bread.
My thumb nevertheless adapts.
At noon I take my phone into the kitchen while making lunch and prop it against the sugar bowl.
A woman I vaguely know is filming herself crying in a parked car.
I also wonder why she positioned the camera before beginning.
Then I feel terrible for wondering that.
Then I wonder whether feeling terrible about wondering makes me compassionate or merely self-conscious.
At 1:22, Marketplace opens.
I don’t remember opening Marketplace.
A woman named Deb is selling seventeen decorative chickens.
The chickens are ceramic.
Deb’s urgency seems excessive.
Three listings later, someone is selling a couch described as basically new.
The couch appears to have survived a maritime disaster.
Another person wants $6,500 for a camper whose roof has developed its own ecosystem.
There is a photograph of the bathroom.
A fern is growing through it.
I have no intention of buying the camper.
I simply want to know what happens to it.
This is apparently a relationship now.
At 2:54, I discover that somebody I haven’t spoken to in twenty-six years has died.
For a moment the scroll stops.
There is the old school photograph.
Not someone I loved exactly, not anymore, perhaps never, but someone who once occupied a desk in the same room while rain struck the windows and everybody believed adulthood was impossibly far away.
A strange homesickness arrives for a place that no longer exists, populated by people who no longer exist in those forms.
I touch the photograph with one finger.
There is nowhere else to put the feeling.
At 4:17, I post something thoughtful.
At 4:22, I edit the edit.
At 4:31, I consider deleting it.
At 4:33, someone I admire likes it.
At 5:46, I am sitting in a parked car outside a store.
I have been sitting there for twelve minutes.
I went inside eleven minutes ago.
There is no explanation for the remaining twelve minutes except Facebook.
Gary is at the emergency room.
Gary has checked himself in publicly.
Someone asks what’s wrong.
I experience an emotion so specific it should have its own organ.
Gary has announced an emergency to 638 people and then invoked privacy.
I am concerned about Gary.
I check Gary’s page seventeen minutes later.
By 6:38, the day has accumulated inside me.
Gary’s undisclosed medical crisis.
The dead classmate’s remembered laugh.
Babies I will never meet.
Opinions from people whose opinions I would never have requested in person.
All of it has passed through the same small rectangle and entered my body with almost equal visual weight.
A wedding is one thumb-flick from a funeral.
A genocide is two thumb-flicks from a squirrel waterskiing.
There is something obscene about it.
There is something tender about it too.
Human beings, everywhere, holding up fragments of existence:
Look what they did to me.
Look how beautiful this sunset was.
The room darkens while the phone remains bright enough to interrogate me.
I scroll lying on one side.
Then on my back, phone suspended above my face in the ancient ceremonial position preceding the Dropping of the Phone Upon the Nose.
The words begin losing their edges.
And sometime after that, I am standing in a forest where every tree has a profile picture.
A white rabbit rushes past wearing compression socks.
Sponsored, says a little label beneath him.
People who interacted with this rabbit also interacted with seventeen other rabbits.
The forest opens into Marketplace.
Every Deb is holding a ceramic chicken.
“FORTY DOLLARS,” they chant.
“I don’t want the chickens.”
Todd is standing in a river holding the same bass from 2017.
“Is that fish still alive?”
Todd has limited who can comment on this post.
Behind him, Melanie rises from the water in a white bikini, and
I immediately feel bad about myself.
Then bad about feeling bad.
Then good about recognizing that I feel bad.
Then suspicious that feeling good about recognizing feeling bad means I am actually worse.
A giant Care emoji floats overhead.
Gary is sitting beside a hospital bed.
“WHAT HAPPENED?” I scream.
I fall through seventeen years of birthday photographs.
I don’t recognize anyone.
My third-grade teacher is there.
She has been dead for years.
She reacts ❤️ to a photograph of my coffee.
“SLOW MORNING,” she screams.
A notification bell the size of a church bell begins chasing me.
Someone liked your comment.
You have memories to look back on.
“I DON’T KNOW THESE PEOPLE!”
Thousands of tiny blue thumbs descend.
Somewhere, Baxter runs past carrying the raccoon’s rotisserie chicken.
This is the happiest thing that has happened.
He leads me toward a door.
Are you sure you want to leave?
You have 7 new notifications.
The door has always known me.
Slowly, shamefully, I turn around.
The Cheshire Cat appears above me, except it isn’t a cat.
It has no body, only a smile assembled from everything I have ever hesitated over.
