We Had to Remove This Post

by Hanna Bervoets

People act like it’s a perfectly normal question, but how normal is a question when you’re expecting the answer to be gruesome?

maybe questions don’t stem from interest in the other person so much as curiosity about the lives we might have led

I saw a livestream of a girl sticking a much-too-dull pocketknife into her own arm—she really had to jam it in there before a decent amount of blood would come out. I saw a man kicking his German shepherd so hard that the poor animal slammed into the fridge, whimpering. I saw kids daring each other to eat dangerously large amounts of cinnamon in one go. I saw people singing Hitler’s praises to their neighbors, colleagues, and vague acquaintances, publicly, unabashedly, out there for potential partners and employers to see: “Hitler should have finished what he started” below a picture of a group of immigrants crammed into a small boat. But those are all cop-out examples—you know that, don’t you?

“Normal” things to see online

the abused dogs, the Nazi salutes—and the girl with the knives is a classic, there are thousands of them, one on every street,

That woman getting knocked off her scooter—can you put that up online? Not if you can see blood. If the situation is clearly comical, then yes. If there’s sadism involved, no. If what’s being shown serves an educational purpose, yes, and ding ding ding, we have a winner, because that exit to the museum parking lot is a hot mess.

“Rules” of what to post

Is it okay to leave this up on the platform? And if not, why not?

The platform doesn’t allow people to post things like “All Muslims are terrorists,” because Muslims are a PC, a “protected category,” just like women, gay people, and, believe it or not, Mr. Stitic, heterosexuals. “All terrorists are Muslims,” on the other hand, is allowed, because terrorists are not a PC and besides, Muslim isn’t an offensive term.

though I didn’t talk to my colleagues much at that point, and by the time I’d begun to realize how shitty our working conditions were, I’d already more or less grown used to those conditions—that sounds weird, doesn’t it?

We cleaved apart cleanly like two halves of a cake, the knife separating us with careful precision so that none of the marzipan roses were damaged.

I began to realize it wasn’t me that was the problem. It was the beauty standards society imposed on us,

My debts were my problem,

Louis shouted, “Jesus Christ, motherfucker, jump already!”

Desensitization

Maybe falling in love isn’t filling up a loyalty card with feelings and actions so much as just adding two things together: desire plus fear.

The fear, on the other hand, grew gradually: fear that she wouldn’t be coming to the sports bar that night, fear that we wouldn’t end up kissing, fear that she’d change her mind. Those were pretty much the stages of falling in love for me.

we’d have the kinds of long conversations that reveal that the amount of love you feel for each other isn’t exactly commensurate with the amount of information you have about each other:

Yes, I think I felt like her words would leave dark streaks on the tiled walls, send raw sewage flowing back up the shower drain; something I’d been afraid of for weeks, a looming disaster that had been lurking in acai berries and meditation apps all this time, but that I’d managed to keep at bay with feigned indifference: Baby, stop, I thought now that the two of us were sitting on the cold bathroom floor. Just stop, please.

“The more you get to know each other, the more awkward the sex becomes,”

“We were talking about Soros,” she says, and I can tell she’s trying to sound as casual as possible: Nothing to see here, they were just talking about Soros, George Soros, the richest Jew in the world, and by extension the most hated Jew in the world—oh yeah, there’s that.

They were nice pictures—good lighting, but not posed; maybe her parents had a knack for photographic timing, or maybe Nona was a girl who knew when to look away in order to look like herself.