There used to be a day when what we could hold in our heads was what we had. This was back before mechanical things that blinked red and green pinpricks of light in every empty room of a house. Cellular phones, computer monitors, television remotes, alarm clocks, you know of the things I speak—all of them never fully sleeping, humming in the dark next to still bodies in a bedroom. Before all of them, endings were endings. Good-byes were good-byes. Hearts broke just once. No longer. Last night, you sat in front of a cold screen and typed in an alias and a secret word and spent a few hours looking at the too-bright screen cycling through pictures of other men touching a girl you loved. You read what they said to her. You saw she still types in lowercase and still misspells ‘wierd’. You came across this one picture of her wearing an MTV shirt. There used to be a time when you’d never have a chance to remember that shirt. You’d never remember what it looked like, threadbare and stretched over the knots of her spine, or crumpled on the floor next to socks and loose change. There used to be a time when burying things once was enough. We were allowed to be strong, back then. The hurt we carried with us was allowed to harden, we could sharpen it into something we could use. There was less blood to pump around, and better sleep to be had, and we weren’t such wet clay all the time and had more room in our skulls for empty things—for happy things.
