Severance

by Ling Ma

What is the internet but collective memory?

The key thing, we reminded ourselves, was never to stop, to always keep going, even when the past called us back to a time and place we still leaned toward, still sang of, in quieter moments.

Nowhere else was there such an elaborate gradient between the real and the fake. Nowhere else did the boundaries of real and fake seem so porous.

The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

There was something unbearably private about this, watching her rehearse her sexuality, informed by the most obvious movies and women’s magazines, with embarrassingly practiced fluency.