Unread Me

I cannot say how often I have seen The Good Place; I know only that I cannot wait every time until Eleanor realises over and over again that THIS is the bad place. Saying I relate to her on this level would sound a bit drastic, considering that she is in an imagined version of hell, but I cannot help myself to think about this sentence day by day more often than ever. 

Scrolling through my phone for hours, watching reel after reel, a loop of hell resides in the palms of my hands – I cannot stop, and I need it from the moment I start my day to the moment I fall asleep. Every free second I get, my eyes wonder to the screen that once promised connection and knowledge, but instead shows me another meme of Trump allegedly blowing either Clinton or a Horse. If this is not the bad place, then I truly need to speak to the Architect of this neighbourhood. 

Funnily enough the same app showing me this, is apparently going to use the collection of over 10 years of my truly mediocre photography for their AI. I should feel more angry about it; I should probably spent hours in the settings to try to defend my work, and yet I feel defeated. Because this is not David versus Golliath, this is just me weighing whether another tech billionaire Zuckerberg is doing enough evil billionairing for me to finally let go of that hell loop that I am so addicted to. 

There is also guilt weighing me down, as I have used ChatGPT before, and it made me feel like I cannot do anything without it, entering a toxic relationship. My brainscells were taken one by one, until I felt like I need to ask it about every single thing in my life. Pathetic and shameful and I am happy I broke it off. But my relationship with it, is a topic for a future essay. 

This essay focus on my attempt to break up with Instagram. Better said, this website will be my attempt to break up with Instagram. I have 371 mediocre photos on my profile, collected all since 2014. And while the hell loop is so addicting, what I most find difficult would be to depart with this photo collection. In 2014, I was only 13 years old and Instagram became a time capsule of my life. Perhaps this is Meta’s superpower, holding everyone’s lifes – while we are all able to leave freely, we feel a sense of ourselves in those profiles. In addition, the perfectly curated algorithms, make us feel like we have our one and only scrap of the Internet, only dedicated to us. Now I am wondering, if this aids parasocial relationships; but that is too off topic at the moment as well. 

So how will this website assist me in this particular break-up? I will upload one by one, or maybe at some times a couple at a time, my photos from that gallery. We start with the oldest and at some point we’ll arrive with my newest. When the time reaches, when my last photo is uploaded, that will be when the last good bye will occur. Considering that it is 371 one photos, I am sure it will take a lot of time, at least a year if not more. I probably should delete it a bit more earlier, but my fingers already itch to scroll for at least one more hour. 

So what is my first photo I have uploaded? It is one of an owl inside of a little plant of mint. The pot, situated on the windowsill in the kitchen. Beautifully squared, with a classic insta filter, and not to forget a classic frame. Could this photo scream more 2014? I doubt it. The day was the 23rd of May, less than two months after my mum passed away. 

We received this mint from a neighbour I believe. I used to play with her a lot as a child. I have heard she does slam poetry these days. Always very creative and much smarter and hardworking than I. I have the distinct memory that we have received this plant because my mum has died, but thinking about it now, it feels rather like a false memory of mine. The time after my mum’s death was confusing and numb – I barely can remember the events after I saw her for the last time. 

She battled cancer for many years; it started with breast cancer. I was seven, and I was playing on my yellow rug in my little bedroom in our newly build house. My mum was an architect, but barely worked in her lifetime – a story of a young bright woman meeting a cardiologist and being told, that becoming a housewife is the ultimate status symbol. That status symbol came with a lot of frustration and anger, and I wished that she had felt strong enough and had a support system that would had helped her to leave. But instead she was trapped, with no own banc account, in a house she designed but never truly owned. 

I was playing on that rug, and I heard crying from downstairs. My first thought was that they are crying about our beloved dog Boss being dead – he died not so much earlier. I loved him very much and I will tell you more about him, once we get to a photo of him. I went downstairs, and my sister was being hugged by my mum. She was crying and I did not understand why. Cancer was not in my vocabulary, I did not know its meaning – I knew what a hospital was, and that it heals people. I was convinced it will heal my mum. 

Six years later, I was in a hospital holding my mum’s hand for the last time in a bright yellow room. Flowers we got her standing on the table at the window, basking in the warm spring sun. It was a Saturday, sunny and warm, and she was laying in the bed, and could not respond. I was there holding her hand, and in complete denial that this is it. I did not understand why everyone is crying and I felt like they just given up. Tomorrow is sunday and it will better, I told myself in a loop.

My Mama did not live to see the Sunday sunrise.