What Twitter Looks Like In A Tragedy
Twitter manifests that, makes it feel real, like a cross-section of all the wild blood flows that happen in our brains when bad things go down.
On days like this, you’re struck by how many different things are happening at once. How many different facial expressions are happening in the same nanosecond. Twitter manifests that, makes it feel real, like a cross-section of all the wild blood flows that happen in our brains when bad things go down.
On days like this, you listen to the BPD police blotter on one tab while watching Jill Abramson give a toast on the next; people wearing white dresses and walking around smiling while, nestled in an adjacent tab, pavement is pink and brown with blood blooms.
On days like this, you walk around the city and peep into small bookstores in the West Village, wanting to find the smallest weirdest corner with wall-to-wall maroon carpet and antique lighting and a librarian with glasses who can read a fat Dickens to you like it’s ninth grade and you’re having pizza for dinner in sweatpants and a lacrosse jersey.
On days like this, you want to rent a hot air balloon and get yourself up, as high as it can go, and sit down cross-legged in the basket, opening a copy of something by Sylvia Plath and drinking tea to remind yourself of your own relative safety/precariousness.
On days like this, when the trends are #bostonmarathon and #Pulitzer and The Paris Review quotes Paul Auster, “I still haven’t mastered the trick of being in two places at the same time,” nothing makes any sense, and it would almost be better if everyone just walked around naked, wearing only crazy hats with pink feather plumes poking out, wearing melancholy tears and just hugging one another, please.
On days like this, you get worried and happy and appreciative and paranoid about your own corporeality, and all you want is blankets, chocolate, cups with handles, and friends who can just sit there and stare at a wall with you.
On days like this, all you want to do is stay put, minimize yourself like a Mac window, Genie effect yourself, get small, hunker down, incognito.
On days like this, you watch the news too much, masochistic with the news, hating yourself and loving that you’re O.K., for now, in a room with four walls and no windows and keep me here, Lord.
On days like this, you think of your parents’ faces. A lot.
On days like this, we veer closer and farther back from an abstract sensitive wound spot that hurts a little bit in the periphery, but we keep getting at it, like a loose tooth, though we know we shouldn’t.
On days like this, Twitter keeps going, glory speeches keep happening, everyone keeps talking and tweeting and the shit doesn’t stop. Nothing stops. Things happen concurrently, and while you’re here in New York at a desk, breathe, and try to feel all the little pieces of you that keep you breathing. All the cells working. Like a good team. And it won’t last. 
