social media

please let me write a tweet in a language nobody else knows

i want to shout and sob

without letting anyone know how ruined i am

i am overwhelmed with panic and my hands begin to shake

the blood running through me goes cold

when i see your face on a list of followers

private account, hidden, behind tinted glass

my hands are shaking

i hate to see how much your hair has grown

your smile—after all this time—still makes my stomach hurt

and the back of my head feels light and heavy at the same time

get the fuck off of my feed.

an instagram caption

i am limited by my choice of medium. every time i attempt to portray an emotion on this platform, i find that i can never properly re-create what i wanted to show in the first place. i can’t take a photograph that adequately explains the feeling of a september breeze on my freshly cleaned skin after two months in bed. i can’t melt my moods into an instagram caption.

though i have tried, no medium has ever consistently served me as well as my writing has. any attempt to sit down and compose music has, with few exceptions, ended in despair. i need not mention my inability to draw or paint. putting words on to paper seems to be the only suitable manner by which i can explain my emotions—and, i might add, it brings with it an inextricable sense of connection to my past and to other writers i’ve admired which i haven’t been able to find any other way. echoes of my betters.

no amount of cropping or application of the right filter can communicate as exquisitely the feeling of a commute into the city every single morning—where, underground, it’s always dark—as the use of no less than two hundred words.