Content Warning: this piece contains references to pandemic — a traumatic stressor — and suicide.
If you are isolated and/or at risk please call 1-800-273-8255 or utilize the online chat option at: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/
Statistics online
are sickeningly low.
Delete the app from the phone.
Delete the account together.
Quintessential advice,
and for good reason.
So here is an elegy to the uncounted.
for the young person–
prisoner to their own mind.
when deprived of therapy
gazing at photos from vacations past
for the elderly sitting in the dark and the quiet
remembering her granddaughter’s eyes.
it was just too juicy to write “natural causes”
in the crisp white space.
for those who wrote a single-line email:
isolation has a dark side.
we are sorry we thought nothing of the ripple
before knowing that he went in stillness.
When we saw the world coming to an end,
we imagined a grand nuclear apocalypse.
The shaking bravado as matter becomes energy.
A flash of fire as WWIII dwarfed his predecessors.
Instead we don’t even know who is missing.
Until we check our inboxes.
Those of us who go on in uncertainty
sit in a lukewarm ethanol bath.
And we wait.
And hope that we learn something.
And they will call us crazy as more and more friends fill our heads.
They’re nothing like the old ones, but they’re something.
We must acknowledge this is necessary.
We must never succeed that this is alright.
And try to dull the buzz growing louder and louder,
bashing its head in against our eardrums.
We are not the only ones who hear it.
We are not alone.
Drawing a carrot on Instagram is nonsense.
Drawing an avocado is no less nonsense.
But the clearing smog.
And endangered populations replenishing the sea.
That is certainly not nonsense.
We have the most powerful tool ever created at the tips of our fingers.
We must use it to show that we are here.
Trying. Hoping and thinking the same thoughts.
Bathing in ethanol not because we are afraid to die,
but because we are afraid to just sit and watch.
By Grace Votja