Letters to The - #7

How can I tell you that sometimes I am so sick of your world? I have watched three documentaries now just describing how Instagram is ruining people’s lives. Not just for a moment, either. It ruins their minds, their perspectives, their relationships, their ability to see reality with clear eyes and unburdened hearts. It rips them apart, like by like. It turns young girls into gyrating titillations who think it’s normal for married men old enough to be their biological grandfathers to comment on the size of their breasts and ask to see them naked. These children armed with self-destructive weapons called camera phones think they have things under control because they don’t reply to the haters and the creeps, because they’ll never meet that man in person. They don’t know that they meet them every day. Nothing is under control. Never have I felt the nauseating spin of the earth like I do now. I’m about to be flung off, and I know that the moment outer space sucks itself into my lungs and freezes me from the inside out and vaporizes all the liquid in my body, it will feel normal and innocuous, because that’s what we are all doing to ourselves down here. We are turning into vapor and empty skin, shoving a vacuum free of true being into our souls and rupturing every nerve ending and blood vessel with overexposure. We are lost in a universal, unending thread of posts and comments and upvotes and downvotes. We beings of only sight, hazy filtered sight. We can’t even call a lie a lie anymore. It’s fake news. Things that are real are not “real.” They are “unfiltered”, and even that might be fake news. We are numb. We don’t smell or taste or feel or hear. We take photos and we see photos and we scroll and scroll and scroll until we are sleepless and nearsighted and we think that’s all there is because that is the brightest thing in our world now. How big is your TV. How new is your phone. How perfect is your selfie. How cute is that filter. How trendy is that hashtag. How lit how dope how fire. We are disintegrating into pixels and bots and AI, and there will be nothing left of the species that was once awestruck by a sunrise, deafened the roar of a waterfall, awakened by the cold wind on a winter morning, humbled the cry of our first child fresh out of the womb. We are too busy taking a selfie, our Crest Strip teeth and fierce eyebrows in the foreground, the new innocent promise of the future in the blurry background, her own first precious moments stolen from her by more love for half a million followers than for the seed of our bodies. We are falling apart, and the earth is flinging me off it. Ultimately, I don’t belong here, but I have to stay, don’t I? I’m a third of the way done, perhaps. Please promise me there are no selfies in heaven.