When you return from the kitchen to your bedroom, your phone falls out of your pocket and reveals what you’ve missed. You fish it out from the mess of potato chips, gum wrappers and tampons and clomp upstairs to lie down and scroll indefinitely, infinitely. You’re a tired body of bags, clothes and old mugs everywhere.
One shoe is still on, one discarded on the floor. It’s nearly 3pm, or is it 11pm? Nothing changes but everything moves as you scroll through your friend’s makeup tutorial, an advertisement for a new organic wine delivery service and a hyper-stimulating Instagram ad: exploding pixelated hearts and millennials blowing kaleidoscopic bubbles from their own zoom rooms.
Sighing, eyes drooping, you turn over and there’s another buzz from your stomach. Software Update 12.4.1. Your Storage is Full. A new email from Change.org: Camilla, can you help? Sign up and save the endangered Pygmy Possum! A call from Mum, a call from Amnesty International, an update on how many deaths in the USA today, your housemate frying an egg downstairs.
The sky is starting to darken outside your window in pinks and oranges. There are pens, socks and charging cords lying like dead animals around your room, and it’s a day like any other. It’s a pandemic like any other. Do you watch the next episode? Or do you exhale, swipe left and apply the filter to your mirrored face? You feel exhausted. You feel like a teenager.
Send it through, put your feet up, play a 5 minute meditation. The world’s collapsing in on itself. Do your tax, leave your apple core on the bedside table and then stare at your ex-girlfriend’s new profile picture. Is she alone now too? You feel like life atm is just a faded version of the memes you slide through on the hour but you go straight through it.
#You do you. #You got this.
#You do you. #You got this.
Surfing (2020), Video piece, duration 04:58
