She slowly moved her thumb over the bright screen, hovered over the Instagram app for 4 seconds and then held down:

Remove “Instagram”?
Removing from Home Screen will keep the app in your App Library
Remove from Home Screen

Delete App 

Cancel

Her eyes strained in the darkness. She thought to herself “what about this screen is my home anyway?” She was opposed to the wording. She hit cancel, opened up the app, and swiped to her messages to see if they had replied. They had not. She had a hunch that she was being ghosted, and that it was probably because of the slow, steady, and public mental break that she had been having. She decided to “Delete App”.

A sudden drop in her stomach indicated that she had not just deleted the app but had signed off entirely from her “community”. How ridiculous, she thought to herself. She swiped over to her notes and wrote down her favorite forums for news and information mongering. She would regularly check them on her browser so that she could continue to be “up to date with the world” while avoiding the demon Doom Scroll to see what they were all up to. Maybe they were happier having exorcised her from their lives. Maybe she deserved the violent silence of being ghosted by people she wanted to spend the rest of her life with because she had “over shared” over scared) too soon. Okay no, none of that, she thought to herself. 

She decided to turn on a lamp. She slowly moved her thumb to the edge of her phone and clicked. Darkness. 

She turned in her bed and picked up a book. She read two pages, put the book down and re-downloaded the app. She instantly went to her “less toxic” Instagram account and decided to check to see when the local dance spot was having its next “event”. She needed physical release. 

“DANCE TO PROTEST ELON MUSK THIS FRIDAY”. She rolled her eyes and double clicked.

She yawned and checked the time. 2:59 AM. Oh great, here It comes, she thought to herself. Right at 3 AM “It” appeared, hunched over in the corner of her room looking at her with a familiar grin. She let out a long arduous sigh, she wished she felt fear but she only felt a deep aggravating annoyance. The demon had changed a bit. Its regular spikey thumbs and horns were less threatening than before. It now looked more like a forest gnome with particularly protruding ribs, shiny beady black eyes, a large grin with lip fillers and a tiny Coney Island tee that said BETTER HELP YOURSELF. She thought of the Better Help advertisements she had been getting recently and felt a wave of nausea hit her. 

“What do you want?” she gargled as she slumped over to the bathroom.

“To watch you, dear” it replied in a slow, Lana Del Rey voice.

“Watch me do what” she said, flatly.

“Scroll, silly”.

“I’m being proactive, I have an idea for a collective” she mumbled to herself while she peed.

“Oh yeah?” It hissed, slipping into a slightly higher octave of mockery. 

“Yes. I want to make an app. Or a website. Or whatever, an online and offline forum for creatives in resistance.”

“Is this because you have been ghosted by one and all? And you feel sad and forgotten and cringy?”

“No.”

“Tell me more about it.”

“Go away.”

“Sounds like someone got royally ghosted and they need to be seen.”

She awoke to the hot greasy NYC summer. Sunday morning. Instinctively, she reached over to check her phone. No messages. 

She felt as though she was in the eye of a curse. She’d had enough of the not-so-romantic hustle for now and thought it was time to leave again.

There were 2 black suitcases. There was one large grey laundry bag that she had stuffed with her blankets and winter coat. She required a total of four suitcases for this escape. When she walked down the block, she encountered a stooped black suitcase. She welcomed the manifested assistance. She began packing the found suitcase, deciding what items she truly “needed”. She opened the red target bag. She took out the two pieces of cow vertebrae she had unearthed in Brattleboro with her friend. The bones had been bleached by the sun. They had hardened orange candle wax that had dripped around the centers. The bones had dried moss stains. She held them. She remembered when her sister was frightened by them when she came to visit, “I just would always be worried there would still be some flesh on them!”. Until then, she had not really thought of that. But still, she was not afraid of them. She wanted to take them with her. She put the bones down, ran to her computer and typed “significance of cow vertebrae in Indian culture”. The AI result search read, “In Hinduism, the vertebrae of a cow signifies a tool for rituals aimed at harming enemies.” A very specific response, pertaining to a very specific time in her life. How curious. She did in fact have a few people in mind for enacting revenge. 

“Oh, you really don’t want to play around with that, girlie...” It appeared in the far-leftist corner of the room. 

She could not help but agree. Perhaps I unearthed someone else’s desire for revenge. Being a Grade A baddie herself, she was always down for a wild ride, but this time around, as she caught her reflection in the dusty window, she was afraid for herself. It was time to put some more flesh onto her own vertebrae, she thought. And so, she broke her own baddie rule, and left the cow vertebrae along with an oversized book of the history of the theatre on her stoop.