Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

Someone tells you they want to help, and they understand your alienation, so you offer them your gratitude before understanding that their allyship is every bit about their image of themselves, far outweighing your well-being or dignity, and they’ll yeet this cumbersome ballast the moment they sense ingratitude, the very instant you obstruct their protagonism. How there’s nothing special in what they want from you, only license; and, like any license, they can always fake one.

People who post takes, the ones who write articles or list college degrees in their bios or use their wedding photos as profile pics, are willing to endure universal hatred in exchange for the illusion that they matter, having subscribed to that corniest of ideals, the online agora.

I guess we feel responsible to the image of ourselves we’ve installed in other people’s heads.

The internet is millions of solitudes blinking in and out of existence, each dreaming the others, where “consensus reality” is less an agreed-upon reality than a reality made of agreement.

You’re an apple, and nothing’s wrong with you, you think. You look, taste, and cost the same as the others. If something were wrong with you, the FDA would’ve caught it. Nonetheless because of your placement, or for some other reason, or no reason at all, no grocery shopper will touch you, and by the time you’re finally noticed, you’re as rotten as you always knew you were.