By Jacob Phillips
You and I were in Florida in July. We took many pictures: Contemplative portraits on the gulf shore. Date night at a pizza parlor. Mocking actors on movie posters. You’d cull the ones you didn’t like and I’d recover them to preserve the record. Then it was Thursday. I was leaving on Friday. I redownloaded Instagram. We curated ten images which would reflect well on us.
Posted.
Friday, we took weepy selfies with labored smiles, wet cheeks, red eyes. I went through TSA, to my gate. I scrolled for five minutes until I remembered I hate Instagram. I purged my phone and continued pretending I have a healthy social-media diet, pretending there’s any such thing.
In August, you came to Raleigh and we did the same.
I worried about this redownload-post-delete cycle. You and others have called me a grumpy old man. I’m never grumpier or older than discussing social media. I loathe it for the same reactionary, juvenoial reasons as the bad boomer cartoonists. I have daydreams about that solar flare that will disintegrate the internet and return us to the pre-information age, before all the appropriated slang, hate-mongering, vapidness. I imagine it removing also the regrettable memories of my adolescence, the lingering aftertaste of foot in my mouth, the vestiges of shed personalities. Then I look at our few shared photographs and remember that you live hundreds (and before that, thousands) of miles away. That at least one of those past selves is responsible for you liking me to begin with. That without the internet, we wouldn’t know each other, and that posting these pictures is a way of celebrating that we do.
Still, nothing stops me worrying that I’m just posting for attention. When I’m so moved by your pearl-white smile framed against the blue-gray waves at neap tide, aren’t I capturing the moment for others to see? Isn’t this my ego leeching off your likeness? Aren’t I as bad as the influencers and advertisers who make life and love into a numbers game?
‘No Jacob, that’s stupid.’ That’s a good answer, but you walk me through it because you’re patient. You say my Instagram is private, only friends like my posts, and I still exhibit enough commitment, honesty, and humility to prove my good intentions. You say the dangerous thing is my cynicism, that if I don’t reign it in it will spoil things much sooner than any Instagram post. ‘Really Jacob, aren’t you just embarrassed to look happy?’
Not with you.
I follow some inflated number of profiles, and I don’t care about any of them. I’m only interested in interacting with people as far as they can be dug out of cyberspace. In the real world, I would only “follow” them to intersections of our fates and interests. But you, Alice, who have led me to the highlights of my life and away from despair, you I would follow absolutely anywhere.
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