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Sad Girl Novel
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25.08
Monday
I read a headline that says even if you are not on your phone, but it is physically within your reach and/or you can see it, then it negatively affects your ability to concentrate. I have known this for a while, which is why I hide my phone in purposefully awkward places while I write. It doesn’t have a specific place it goes, because then I will know that it is there in my mind’s eye, which is the same thing as seeing it, when having an imagination and flexing it like a muscle is my one exact talent, and also what I am doing a university degree in (poetry). Before I start writing, I skim the small machine awkwardly across my carpet in slightly different directions each time, turning away before I can see which piece of furniture it lands softly under. Sometimes I shove it beneath a seat cushion while trying to pretend I’m super chill and that’s a normal thing to have to do. It works very well and then I can’t find it for hours, even when I am trying to. Sometimes, while ransacking my bedroom, I find an old vape instead and suckle on it before I know what’s happening. The headline, which I am probably only seeing in the first place because of the software’s ability to breadcrumb me news that confirms opinions I already have, prompts me to pat myself on the back for this elaborate game I play with a piece of metal and glass, a small machine that happens to be a portal to everything that ever has happened or will. The headline emboldens me to go to a social engagement with a classmate completely sans phone. If I’m being honest, the other person likely sees me as a date, and I them as an acquaintance and a lesser poet than me. Perhaps because I’m looking for an out, I recount the headline to my acquaintance-date while looking disdainfully at their phone, which they’ve placed screen down on the table next to their fork, bestowing it a place in the table setting. Not getting the hint, they reach out every now and again to stroke the back of it with their pointer and middle finger, like someone would finger a pendant on a necklace or yoke around their neck. Then they flip it over to light up the screen. I smile primly at this, and, in an effort to distance myself from this era of normalised addiction, leave. How boring that I only get to live through this era, when others got opium dens and methamphetamines rattling like Tic Tacs in their pockets. The next morning at brunch, I recount this story to my friends, and when I get to the part about the phone as a piece of cutlery, I gesture emphatically to the spot-in-question on the table, and my phone is already there. I grab it and say ‘oh’, scoff nervously, and my friends make side-eye contact with each other in a way that makes me think they are mutually agreeing on how annoying I am. But then I am wrong, they are pausing before they decide to tell me they are both self-diagnosing (ADHD) and self-medicating (focus drugs) and, long story short, there’s a girl called Val who can hook you up, she’s the girl about campus, and Joy, we think you gotta call her.
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