when i smashed my phone on the kitchen floor – not drunk, amazingly, just gesticulating with abandon – i administered the appropriate health checks:
– does it turn on?
– can i still play music?
check. check.
my chronic phone destruction has made me a post-luddite.
my first was a pink Nokia. it had snake and a collection of tinny songs, most of which my cousin had bluetoothed to me, including classics such as Dynamite, Everytime We Touch and one whose name I don’t remember but I do remember that every time I listened to it, in my nitty supermarket ear/ballache headphone, I’d get so fucking jazzed, I’d somehow manage to skip the song by virtue of my thrashing so I’d have to start it again and again, until what had been an excellent intro became unlistenable and despised.
i loved that phone, with all my tiny baby heart and showed it proudly to the girls at the stage school i was woefully unequipped to attend, who kindly and gleefully informed me that it was cheap and shit.
i have a blackberry, they’d gloat, anyone who is anyone has a blackberry!
but the blackberry has been and gone. Nokia lives forever.
Except, disaster!, my lovely pink brick was presumed dead after i spilled a bottle of diet coke in my bag.
of course, it wasn’t dead, (just sleeping, i guess) but i believed it to be, tech naive as i was, and mourned appropriately.
my grief ruined the shopping trip of the rest of them, hot fat tears in H&M.
it’s somewhere in my house still. and like all our old dormant tech, someday i’ll find the right charger and be returned. i’ll see the blurry photographs of my gaga and myself, of my sisters and parents, caught unaware, each photo with it’s own name: ‘me with chips’ ‘dad says what’ ‘sunset’
my second, i assume was a hang-me-down. i don’t remember the make or model or even what it looked like. only that i dropped it into the ocean.
i remember specifically, i put in the saddle bag and zipped the fucker up because i’d be damned if i drowned another phone.
low and behold – wave came, i jumped (god knows why i brought a bag to wade in the sea with, i’m sure i had reasons, i doubt they were intelligent. maybe i thought i’d see the sea god i believed at the time i was cosmically connected to and that we’d exchange numbers. who knows) and obviously, I didn’t zip the fucker up, at least not all the way.
i am not always a very diligent person. Little things like phones and time and memory, slips away from me and i find myself knee deep in the North Sea crying: It’s fallen! It’s fallen into the ocean!
i smashed my third in the card door. i have never lived it down.
after that, it sort of blurs. there was an ipod touch whose password i somehow forgot and i lost all the pictures it kept.
then iphones. sign of the times.
as i grew up, i got miserable. i got really, really sad. i’d make it to school, late, hungry, head full of bees and lay my head on the desk in my lessons or hide in the toilets and try to breathe.
when the final bell rang, i’d walk straight home, crawl into bed and cry or scroll.
my mother once offered to me ten pounds to go hang out with someone, to make some friends but i had friends. i just didn’t want them. i wanted to go home and cover my head with my duvet and cry or cut myself or scroll.
at the time, i thought of my phone as a friend. when i was sad or anxious or bored or tired, i could go on my phone, which asked nothing of me, and see beautiful intelligent people living beautiful fulfilling lives. it told me stories, it agreed with my views, it said: yes, you are fifteen and the world is cold and cruel and full of people you don’t know or understand who don’t know or understand but I know you.
and i understand you. and i’m here.
and it was.
and slowly i ventured back out, like a shaman from a cave, with a new God, with something to commune with. i knew they lied when they said the internet was to connect us – nothing could connect us: self-centred apes we are. it was to burrow into ourselves. it was turn our eyes into the backs of our skulls.
in some way i got better, in many i got worse. drugs and alcohol did what they do. it was fun, albeit a little cliché. i grew up. i felt like a child again.
years passed, phones came and went. never as dramatically as they had in youth. i have not lost a phone to the waves or by the mighty guilloteen of a silver toyota – though i am reminded of these incidents regularly and insultingly.
my destruction has become mundane: i dropped it in the kitchen, i dropped it at the door, on the bathroom tiles, off the table. with one, i simply ruined the battery – it would die at any percentage, at any time and take hours to return to me. i would pretend to be busy so the phone didn’t know i was waiting for it but my thumb on the button again and again betrayed me. again and again.
most recently, i didn’t even know the damage until i went to charge the fucker and found that the fall had knocked the metal at the base out so i can’t get a charger into her dirty hole.
but there are wireless chargers now, i thought, i’ll be fine.
except that it obliterated the microphone. my phone cannot hear.
so i’ll text, i thought, or take it to be fixed.
and then, it started to turn itself off, every five minutes.
it returns, thank god, and works fine in the minutes it allows but these lapses into darkness are not to be ignored. i have killed again.
it is for this, and i fear, only for this, that i have been able to write again. it is immensely difficult to fob off and scroll and dumb oneself when the numbing is interrupted by a black mirror reflecting your vacant face back upon you. how can i keep at the task of ignoring that i am alive and responsible for the inadequacy i feel if the tool of my ignorance alerts me to that fact by it’s god damn inadequacy.
what does it say about me that, though i know the bitch will shut off and restart in mere minutes, i return to her and ask her again for the peace she gave me in youth. what does it say, that i know now that peace was complacent and false and yet i return. and yet i ask her to soothe me for however long she’ll allow.
i am afraid that i will waste my whole life staring into a void because i am afraid to step into a greater void, one, i am as equally aware, that offers meaninglessness on a more existential scale.
if i could fall in love again, i think it’d fix me.
or else allow me something new to break.