Worry

by Alexandra Tanner

“Actually,” Poppy says, “it’s not a story from a friend. It’s just a funny tweet I saw.”

Relatable

I want to buy a SodaStream, but Poppy doesn’t want to support Israeli apartheid.

i love you poppy

Every time I think of something I want I manage to talk myself out of it. I close my eyes and tell myself to think hard about my deepest wish for my future life. I tell myself it’s okay to imagine; that I’m safe inside my own head; that I can get specific; that my desires are worth considering. Before I know it, it’s morning, and I don’t remember dreaming of anything.

But the thing is that when something’s dead, you can’t say anything about it that’ll bring it back. Poppy’s ideas about dead art, to me, are just as numbing as the ideas in the play. The shows I watch are dead. The middling novels I take apart bit by tiny bit for BookSmarts are dead. Dead art is everywhere. Dead art is my life.

why is it, I think, while getting stoned out of my mind off Poppy’s shitty vape pen, that in this life, in our simulation, in whatever terrifying meaningless thing it is we’re all doing every day, we can only create infinite and infinitely worse versions of the things we already have instead of good new things we need?

I’d thought that relationships ended only when something huge and irredeemable happened: something that totally wrecked you both, something neither of you could move past. But at some point I realized relationships could just end. You could just feel done.

Back home, after the talk, I open my computer and sit down to write for the first time all year. I flip through a folder full of screenshots of the mommies, willing an intelligent thought about America to come to me. Not a single one does; I’m not surprised. I never really thought there’d be a project, a website, an essay about the Internet and femininity and identity and personhood and capitalism and nationalism and anti-Semitism. I just wanted an excuse to feel like the way I looked at the Internet was different than the way everyone else looked at the Internet; like the way I wasted my time was special. There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer. I’m a Floridian. I’m a consumer. I’ll never blossom into the woman of ideas I like to imagine myself as late at night. It’s not that art is dead. It’s just that I’m not going to be one of the ones who makes it.