The big and small screens which are all I can see

 In the video for “I Feel Fantastic”, I am standing in a white void in front of a screen I can barely make out for all that flashes across it at once. There is comfort in this flat object that overtakes my field of vision, in the girly nostalgia of dolls and iPods, in the blurry videos of pretty girls I can imagine that I am, in the images of myself I can imagine that I am, too. 

Today, I woke up thinking about the parts of being an artist that most artist types are not naturally inclined towards: budgeting, timelines, feasibility. I started shaking and went to turn off the time-delayed locks I put on my social media apps. I waited out the 5 minutes and opened an app. I watched whatever the app wanted to show me for 10 minutes until my time-limited session elapsed and I had to unlock it again. By the time I’d used all 5 sessions back-to-back, I couldn’t tell you what I’d seen, but I’d compressed the sharp edges of my panic into a dense layer of static deep enough in my chest that I could get up out of bed. I made breakfast, drank coffee.

I’m not sure what happened between this and the moment I remember next, sitting on the floor beside my bed, calling my mom because I’d gotten stuck again. I was halfway through my daily allowance for a second app which did the exact same thing as the first. I felt ashamed telling her that it was the only thing I trusted to temporarily keep me from losing my shit.

When the screen breaks, it rematerializes exactly where it was: it is an unchangeable fact. Somehow, surrounded by its fragments on the floor, my virtual self and I still face its inevitability. Watching from the other side, nothing has changed except I am noticing that I am not in control. The screen is harder to look at but I am looking all the same. The thing that shows me cute jeans is now letting me know there is a gambling market for predictions on the details of climate disaster and nuclear war this year. My friend Cricket inconveniently deconstructs the image of the “Digital Girl”, questioning with it all the aspirational images I like to cast across the blank egg of my Internet Face. None of these facts last longer or fall heavier than the Blythe doll, the affirmation written in glowing script over a bunny who looks like she (she must be a she) is crying. They are images, disappearing as quickly as they appear. They are real but not. They are entertaining until I notice them bleeding into each other, see the shapes of the pixels, think less “what is happening to the world” than “what is happening to my brain?”

What work remained to be done existed only on a slightly bigger screen, and changed no more about my immediate surroundings than the scrolling spiral. Still, I had some abstract understanding that its real consequences land closer to me, that they pay monthly for the floor where my body was sitting, waiting. My mother’s voice, which was real before anything else, helped me to notice it again. I left my apartment. I didn’t look at a screen until I had walked 10 minutes in the sun and arrived someplace different. I ran numbers, which are imaginary, and tried to connect them to things that weren’t. I mostly found spikes in my chest, rising up into my throat. I breathed into them when I could. I escaped them in smaller doses when I couldn’t.

I closed my laptop and saw the familiar white void in my mind. I looked in from outside now, watching a screen on a screen, two avatars mirrored through it. Then I saw myself sitting next to my bed, my phone only the size of one hand. My avatar holding hands with hers. When the screen is gone, it doesn’t shatter, doesn’t leave traces or shards. You may only know you’re looking at something directly when you pay attention to how it changes: slowly, permanently. Under that rare and necessary weight, I hold my gaze to failure, taking notes while I can.