Another cat video started to play on automatic as Kira scrolled through, bored with the flashing lights and sounds on her screen. She had found herself lately bored more often by what was there—an overabundance of ads for beauty, plants, cozy kitchens, and subscriptions to The Atlantic. It was less and less delightful and more and more boring.
It was difficult to keep her attention grounded; back and forth, moving through the endless words of trite, sometimes condescending empowerment advice in digestible meme formats…clips…pictures of her happy friends and their perfect families or vacations…She’d switched her screen to black-and-white, a hack attempt at limiting her usage by making the over-saturated bright colors of her tiny digital window less appealing. It worked, some of the time. But more often as not, there was just an urge and a desire to be … free.
If she attempted to pinpoint the feeling, to name down to a sensation, she struggled, and felt the gnawing tug of looking at her phone or screen again to avoid it. That was the problem. How does one face something that illusively struggled to be named?
What was it she wanted to be free from? Of?
Her social work friends would have called it introverting, others perhaps escapism, numbing, atrophy of the mind, anesthesia for the unending reel of work, traffic, coffee, exhaustion. Her eyes flicked to the under-watered snake plant curling desperately toward the ceiling, its spiked points beginning a turn toward sepia. It was another task to the mental checklist she just didn’t feel like jotting down, though she knew in another week or two the plant would catch her eye and she’d kick the responsibility down the road to future Kira. It was a future Kira problem. And past Kira was a self-centered, lazy pain who had just … ceased to care for a while. And it felt good to delay the responsibility of caring, but the inevitability of its return…as the thought flickered into her mind she thumbed past a series of side-scrolling images of Balenciaga shoes. Who were those intended for?
It wasn’t clear in her memory, exactly, why attitudes toward apathy had evolved the way they had. Happy pictures of distant relatives and old friends in their Vineyard Vines tunics and khakis, or the neon-Barbie-esque chic of Lily Pulitzer sack dresses assaulted the screen. Well, they might have pierced her eyes in the semi-darkness if she’d had the colors turned on. It was 2:30 a.m.
She shifted her arm underneath the soft cotton of her pillow and cursed internally. She’d gone to bed at 10 p.m. Fairly reasonable, then been awake since 12:30 a.m., with no change in how wide awake she’d become in the span of seconds. What had the dream been? Tiredly closing her eyes, the memory of the action swam behind them, nonsensical images like water dribbling through her hands as she attempted to pull them into a coherent understanding of the beginning, middle, and end. But there was nothing more to dredge through, just a vague awareness of irritation, followed by apprehension. Whatever it had been, it would and did remain, shrouded in the quiet of the night she struggled to fall asleep to.
A series of images arranged in a collage floated past, and she paused. A dark haired woman of fair complexion, with a pert, upturned nose and a cute beauty mark near the corner of her mouth, had posted a series of headshots featuring herself in three-quarters profile, Mona-Lisa smile pasted inquiringly on her pretty face. Kira scanned the post quickly, feeling her curiosity morph into disdainful envy, or … disgust.
“Hey guys! Take a look at this foundation from Earthbound Beauty! Here’s the before and after shots of their different products! No joke, and I am not kidding, this is the smoothest foundation I think I’ve ever used. It’s completely flawless and provides the most complete coverage without all the harmful chemicals other products on the market use. I am totally IN LOVE with how dewy and soft this finish turned out with the Prime Day Prima Dona Finishing Powder. Message me in the comments if you want to know more!”
It burbled up, stronger and hotter than she’d realized it would. It was irritation, anger…colored puce or lime…it was jealousy. Envy at this woman. She clicked on Soraya’s profile and started to scroll through the posts and the pictures. Her husband, Allan, 6 foot two of dirty blond hair in a blazer and button up, holding their new baby, in front of a brick town-home in downtown. The baby was styled in a pink bonnet, eyelet lace trim around the edges, matching on the bubble dress the baby wore, a soft Swiss Dot pattern. A new home. A marriage. Picture perfect blistering white smiles that were a little too fluoride-inspired to be real. The burning knot in her stomach grew as she saw Soraya publicizing Allan’s new book—his first book—a political thriller. Kira curiously clicked on the link, saw the page reload to Amazon and started to read through the synopsis—an aide caught up in a scandal, then linked to a murder when one of his fellow staffers was found dead in a canal—the reviews. Her heart sank as she saw an endorsement from Lee Childs.
How the hell did Allan know Lee Childs?
How the hell did this PA Bro get an endorsement from my dad’s favorite author? Wtf!?
She clicked the side button to turn the phone off and slammed it into her nightstand. Flipped over onto her back, the burning had turned into a tight pressure just under the collar bone, above her breasts. Her breathing had become shallower, and she wondered quietly in her head, what it was again she was doing with her life. Her boyfriend had broken up with her two months before, and the unfairness of it started whirling again. Aaron.
Not for the first time, she fingered her left finger with her right hand, feeling a painful knife sliding into her heart. It was a task to force herself to breathe again, to draw air in through her nose and force it out. Breath in peace, joy, love, breath out anxiety, fear, hurt. But this could not be done if she didn’t face the hurt. Being told someone wanted to marry you and spend the rest of his life with you had been elating; then being lied to for the next three months that this person wanted that life with you, only to turn around and breakup because he wasn’t happy … she still was trying to make sense of it. None of it had made any sense. Kira struggled but her brain reached for the things her friend Liz had told her. Liz was a therapist, professionally, who specialized in CBT.
She did the breathing. Over and over, her ears straining for other sounds outside of her own breath, and settled on the fan in the room gently humming, on the traffic outside, the air conditioning whirring away through the ventilation system.
She didn’t like Soraya; she never had and she never would. But hating her, envying her because the other woman’s life had turned out to be so picture perfect, did not diminish her own gains. Kira had a steady job, a decent one, maintaining the records in the database for Dr. McMichael. Unlike other dental offices she’d worked in, this one was good; the dental hygienists were friendly, polite, kind—older women who’d been at the practice for more than a decade—and who were sincere.
Who didn’t use their personal social media profiles to hock garbage MLM scheme products onto their friends. That was it.
That was what had tipped her irritation and fueled the envy. It wasn’t as much the perfect life Soraya had. The two of them would continue in their own spheres, separate unconnected lives except for the imaginary virtual tether that created the illusion of relationship. All seeming random ephemera, of a life that had nothing to do with her own, reminding her of her own sad circumstances. It hd been the all caps “IN LOVE” that had ignited the sharp pin blossoming in the center of her rib cage.
Aaron had been lovely, for the time they’d dated; he’d been a perfect gentleman, never moving too fast, well-read, kind. He just, unfortunately, didn’t know what he wanted. And as painful as that truth had been to acknowledge, his not knowing what he wanted was more a symptom of the deficiency of formation in his own internal affairs than it was a reflection of her. Didn’t mean it didn’t still hurt.
Kira though, had her solution. She opened up the screen again and navigated to the drop-down menu under Soraya’s name and smiling image, with the too-perfect white incisors just peeking past her lip. Pressing the imaginary button on the glass, she chose “Unfollow”; she didn’t need to unfriend Soraya, but she also didn’t need to see all the gimmicky look-at-me bullshit product endorsement she was posting about. Pressing the button to turn the screen off again, Kira gently tossed the phone across the carpeted floor, hearing it slide before coming to a stop somewhere at the end of her bed. She’d curse out future-Kira for doing that, but feeling a sense of rest—about both Soraya and Aaron—she knew it was the best thing if she intended to fall back to sleep.
Kira pulled the cool, soft cloth of her pillow closer to her face, hugged it a little tighter, and closed her eyes in an attempt to doze off.
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