When Tanya was awake, she always had her laptop on, and she spent so many hours on the Internet, that she didn’t notice the day pass by.

What Tanya liked about the Internet was the way people poured themselves into their created alcoves, their self-designated corners of the web. Their whispered words were so private and so exposed. They poured themselves—more of themselves then they probably even knew they were letting go—into emptiness and something began to take shape. The words, feelings, pictures chosen or created, they built up. This mass of images and information becomes shaped water, outlined by an absent, malformed jar. It’s Peter Pan’s shadow. It is a reverse shed snakeskin. It is a glistening metallic id. And it is a thing that, after some time, can stand on its own: concrete, whole.

 

At one point Tanya remembered that there was a word “tumbler” that indeed meant “a container for holding water.”

Tanya did love words; had carried around a pocket dictionary with her up through her teens but now she could look any word up quickly on the web. She liked when people made up words—she had seen “gloopy” once—and people did this plenty on the Internet. An acceptable way of expressing oneself. These words stood real, valid. But not real, really. She could not physically touch them. But she could smear her hands across the computer screen, which was more than could be done than when listening in person.

 

A near colorless thread floated in the bath water. At first, she couldn’t be sure it really was a thread and not some drifting essence off her skin. She tried several times to pick it up, still unsure of its reality, and finally lifted it above water. Now she could see its light blue color. It came from one of her towels, which were ratty with age.

She dried off, tossed the thread.

 

Tanya Googled how to make a Mobius strip. She just wanted to know.

 

Tanya noticed the Internet’s relationship to Sylvia Plath was shifting. The detachment that had created incorrectsylviaplathquotes.tumblr.com—“All I wanna do is gunshot gunshot gunshot cash register noise.” –Sylvia Plath “ ‘Made out with a hotdog?’ Oh my god, that was one time!” –Sylvia Plath—still existed, but had also been commented on, churned around, and brought mentions of her to being more tied to Plath’s poetry and life.

Tanya knew several Plath poems. She enjoyed the one about her children and a balloon, and also the one about plastic surgery.

There were Plath’s poems and other writings and then there were Ted Hughes’s. His collection decades later in response to her suicide, in response to how people saw him as a part of this marriage. A very real case of first-person narration. Whose word to take. What worth is reliability. No one can ever really know the depths of another’s soul. But people sure made a go of it on the Internet. How to match words to what we want them to convey. Spackled onto something lacking the physicality to hold on to.

Tanya saw someone write, “In real life, some people have actually loved me, unlike you losers.”

 

 

As much as Tanya loved the Internet—listening to T.S. Eliot reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on YouTube, reading people’s personal posts written both with false, desperate and very real, vulnerable intimacy—she once walked by a concert poster with the event title “Music IRL” and she both hated the people who chose that name and herself for knowing what it meant.

 

Tanya hoped she never became an anonymous commenter.

“I am sad and angry when pictures, you and Thomas but it is good to think how Carla’s a hag. She rubs the body lotion the best lavender and hay perfect perfect perfect and vomit.”

To be anonymous. To walk through life as indistinct. Without being watched or looked at. Eyes, always.

Clicking link to link, no one watched you.

 

 

An eye doctor told Tanya that she saw more and more cases of “dry eye.” When people spent too much time staring at a screen, their blinking slowed, causing their tear ducts to produce less moisture.

 

There was that glow screens gave off. Blueish white. Computer and laptop screens. Cell phone screens. Tablet and eReader screens.

It was a color Tanya was beginning to recognize as home. And she imagined that many people shared this feeling. Someone could be in a completely strange, new setting, and if the glow turned on somewhere they would turn to it.

She didn’t even notice the glow after time. Then she got this program that dimmed the screen to a pinkish glow as the sun went down, and remained so for the night. Wow, what a life-changer. All these different programs, to meld the computer to you, bring you to the computer.

Every essay had links that lead to more essays, or Instagram feeds, every blog talked and took from at least one other blog and lead Tanya to more new, while the shade of the darkness outside shifted.

Sometimes late at night, Tanya would pull away from the keyboard, look down at her own hands and arms—move around the room in a way that felt slo mo—down at her body. She came to the conclusion that her body was real, and had to keep reminding herself that. She wrote on her hand, “This is real, this is really my body.” She rubbed the words with her thumb; she pressed the words to her forehead, to her cheeks.

Amanda Boyle is a short story writer from New York. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh. You can read more work by her in Cosmonauts Avenue, and forthcoming from Blue Lyra Review, and Critical Quarterly. You can follow her online here: @amboyle7