Recently I've dealt a lot with myself, a lot of it in lore. I've agonized and manipulated myself to others.
The girl I followed on insta threw up on her account a few months after I started following her. She lived a beautiful life trapped in a tiresome lie she didn't believe. Once she wore a satin glittered dress with these barbeque pink shoes of heels, with just the right amount of block. Why I remember this so cautiously has got to do something with my foolishness and silliness of thinking that I'd ever be as desirable as her. Also, the reason I remember perhaps, is because I wanted to. At times of odd hours of noon, I'd find myself alone to act out the exact poses she decided to post. Cleanly shaven arms with no folly in play, in simple words just flawless. She looked rich.
When I was younger I'd often scorn at the idea of social media and it's repercussions it had on people. I always knew that I'd never put myself in a position to feel sorry for myself, to pity myself or even wish to be someone else's shadow. Now a few years past the line I find myself in that exact compromised position something to which I turned my back to; Once, after I found my elder cousin in the corner of a kinderly bathroom stall of a Tea shop that sold it's biscuits like hot cakes, whilst we went out to travel as a family and had to stop down for refreshments. I found her bawling and sobbing and repeating actions of unaliving oneself, lines blooded marks on her pastel-colored skin, and I could only stare and stare as a 12-year-old still fumbling and grappling with the idea of menstruation and mensuration.
She'd found out that her beau, someone of whom she repressed agonised feelings of hers, so as to not upset him, and prayed for in the closeness of temples she found in her way whilst carrying vegetables, someone who'd she wish for in her dreams; had taken an unlikely interest in another woman. He left, saying that the woman on the net had given his sexual desires an absurd invigoration, that she was someone who deeply fulfilled him in his entirety and thought of him as hers. But so did my cousin. She'd reverted. He got cocky only to reply she'd do nothing for him and shrugged away.
In my heart that day, there grew a bane, a void for men. Maybe they enjoy this, this immense amount of deceived pain. They receive it, flaunt it and claim that it's theirs but it's not. It's not true, that pain was hers, only hers to share. He had no right. He shouldn't have. I've tried to sympathise with men such as him. So crude, so lone, and every time I've failed. And then they say we're just women. A woman tried. A woman tired.
A month later with all settled, there had been much talk all around. My mother very nonchalantly exclaimed all the broken tales my cousin went through; all of this under one breath, when she met with some of my dad's relatives and I sat there soaking it all in. I had seen the horrors unaware of the reason. They sat there soaking it all in, growing perceptions, rethinking relations, forming reactions and physical expressions on still faces.
One had bluntly expressed her disregard for this generation and the other was surprised at my cousin's lack of respect for her parents and collectively the group just felt dissociated and uncomfortable within their own periphery knowing that the mother was in the most wrong. My dad believes social media is in the wrong. And it seems to me a matter of amusement as I find myself in a dwindling position to believe neither. As I go on to write this it's probably the sixth time I'd be deleting that godforsaken app, all these five unresponsible years I've been using it. It gives me no pleasure though, to do this but it does give me a sense of superiority over an algorithm that's so unkind yet so bold. I'm so helpless, I know I'll run back again.
The girl I started following last month hasn't returned yet, I believe there's a depletion in my dopamine release. I stare deadly at unkind things on the net and I hope I will never be there in that position.
I feel nothingness.