Ghost Signal
I have no idea who would read this. Writing anything here feels like releasing a signal into deep space and knowing the chances of it reaching anyone are low.
But never zero, right?
Maybe Iām writing this just to settle the noise in my own head. Iām not a teenager anymore. I havenāt been for a while, though not long enough to feel like a real adult either. And the older I get, the more my timelines blur and tangle. If you could look inside my mind, youād see a ball of yarn: threads pulling in every direction, knotted, looping back on themselves, impossible to follow.
Iām in my mid-twenties now, which feels fake in the way that all ages past eighteen used to feel fake, like something that only happened to other people. Life didnāt turn out the way I expected. Mostly because, for a long time, I didnāt actually expect to be alive this long.
When you grow up a little sad, the future feels theoretical. Like one of those ācoming soonā movie trailers you assume youāll never buy a ticket for. And then suddenly youāre here, in the theater, popcorn in hand, and the movie is already halfway through and no one explained the plot.
Also, the world isā¦ not great.
Every time I open the news it feels like humanity is speedrunning a bad ending. Fires, floods, wars, men with too much power and not enough empathy. History doesnāt feel like a story anymore. It feels like a list of warnings we keep ignoring.
Meanwhile, I spend my days at a desk.
Literally.
A beige desk. A blue-lit screen. Spreadsheets that breed when Iām not looking at them. Columns and rows and tiny numbers that somehow determine whether I get to eat next month.
I smile at people through emails. I say āKind regardsā to people I would not willingly stand next to in a grocery store line.
Itās strange, performing politeness for eight hours a day. Like customer service cosplay.
All because two people in the late ā90s decided it might be nice to have a baby.
Which is wild when you think about it. You donāt consent to existence. One day you just wake up and youāre responsible for rent and taxes and remembering passwords.
Now I have to budget and buy groceries and compare the price of tomatoes like this is a meaningful life skill (although hunting for sales can be a useful talent). I have to worry about being productive and presentable and good enough.
And no matter how hard I try, thereās this quiet, stubborn feeling that Iām failing some invisible test.
Not good enough for myself.
Not good enough for anyone else.
Every day, while staring at that blue screen, I start to see her.
My younger self.
She always flickers in the corner of my eye.
In the reflection of the monitor.
In the music I play too quietly through one earbud.
In the way I still open Tumblr tabs like muscle memory.
Sheās thirteeen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Lying on her bed at 2 a.m., reblogging sad poetry and thinking feelings were the most important thing in the world.
And sometimes I swear sheās looking at me like,
Is this it?
Is this what we grew up for?
Since the beginning of this year, Iāve noticed something strange. Teenagers online have started romanticizing my teenage years. Not mine specifically, obviously. No one is making edits about me crying over math homework in 2015. But the era. The aesthetic. The time period.
The years I barely survived.
They talk about it the way we used to talk about the early 2000s. Or the ā90s. Like it was softer then. Cooler. More authentic. Like everyone was listening to the right music and falling in love at the right time and taking blurry photos of their friends under streetlights.
I see edits with film grain and old iPhone timestamps. Posts about āmissing old Tumblrā and āwanting to be a teen in 2014.ā Kids born in, like, 2010 saying they wish theyād experienced it. I remember how we would joke that in a decade or two there will be a teenage girl out there with old posters of One Direction plastered all over her bedroom walls, listening to their music, saying how she was born in the wrong generation.
And I want to gently grab them by the shoulders and say:
We were just sad in lower resolution.
Thatās all.
We were anxious, and dramatic, and lonely, and convinced nobody understood us.
We were just doing it with Lana Del Rey lyrics and badly coded blog themes. Iām even listening to her Born to Die album as Iām writing this. The Paradise edition, of course.
But I get it.
Because we did the exact same thing.
We romanticized the early 2000s. The messy MySpace years. The ā90s. Polaroids and flannel and lives we never lived. We kept reaching backward, convinced happiness had happened slightly before we arrived. Like joy was always one generation out of reach.
Maybe thatās just what being young is. Believing you missed the good part.
Lately, watching them romanticize my past feels like looking at an old photograph of a house that burned down.
And still. There was something real there.
Something alive.
I think thatās why Iām writing this. But itās not because I think I have wisdom to pass down, like some ancient elder at the age of twenty-something. That would be ridiculous.
I still eat cereal for dinner. I still donāt know how taxes work.
But maybe I can leave a record. A messy one. An honest one.
In case someone out there feels the way I did, convinced they wouldnāt make it far enough. Convinced the future was a locked door that only other people had keys to.
Maybe theyāll find this.
Tumblr isnāt what it used to be. Half the blogs are ghosts. The dashboard feels like an abandoned mall. You can almost hear the fluorescent lights buzzing.
Sometimes posting here feels like taping a note to a wall in an empty building.
But writing has always been weird like that. It travels. It slips through cracks in time. You write something alone at 2 a.m., and somehow, years later, a stranger reads it at exactly the moment they need it most.
Like the universe quietly forwarding mail.
So maybe this is just that.
A small signal.
A record.
Proof that we were here, and that it hurt, and that we kept going anyway.
If it reaches no one, fine.
If it reaches one person whoās staring at their own blue screen thinking, āI donāt think I have a futureā, then maybe it was worth sending.
