Out 2 4get

Out 2 4get

My friends and I move quickly through the dark streets between bars, hurrying to get out of the cold. Walking down a broad street, we become walled-in by unseemingly provocative questions around every corner: Need A Refill? Or Missing Something? From grocery delivery app adverts on the buildings and bus stops. I begin to see myself as that empty and crunched-up carton of oat milk on the ad; What am I missing? We arrive at Cheshire Bar. Its large windows display people and life, inviting you in from the empty streets. Generally walking into bars, you notice how there are waves of themes that flood everyone’s conversation. The Trends moving in and out like a tide in the weekly cycle of bar life, news life, most lives. Everyone foams from their mouths and flashes their teeth with a slight gnarl, waiting to slip their words into relevance. Their choice of words and topics repeat the advertisements, slogans, headlines we see everyday down the street, but now saying it themselves, claim it as intellectual property.

We sit down in a corner of grandma-style armchairs and couches with a table and candle in the centre, and take off our heavy coats to reveal highly stylised outfits and libidos for ourselves. We sit and take photos of ourselves to post later, looking good by the candlelight. We film ourselves sipping our cocktails and laughing, recreating TikTok trends.

There are so many photos in my camera roll that I don’t know what to do with. I try to imagine their lifelines as digital objects that last forever. It’s hard to grasp its materiality in this way. What is to happen to all these pictures? It’s a digital hoard, though my camera roll might as well be empty.

We talk about trends online, and the latest news headlines. We relate to each other on shared opinions. And yet, it feels as if opinions are produced for situations. I find them orienting themselves in the environment, capturing an aligned perspective in-between each shutter of a new thought and opinion exhaled. Are they based on my own experiences? I don’t think I can differentiate between what I say and where these words come from. Are they from my life, or the life I see online? When someone on the other side of the room falls off their chair, my friend Emma is quick to pull out her phone and show a meme she was reminded of when seeing the fall. Even reactions and sense of humour have become immediate snapshots of universal experiences that have been endlessly documented. It makes me wonder if any internal experience is unique to the individual.

I notice the tabletop illuminated by candlelight, our possessions lying in a ring of light almost hovering above a disintegrating surface where the shadows are darkest. Our phones, a disposable camera, vape pens and a notebook are sprawled over the table creating a portrait of the moment. I pick up my phone and take a picture of the table, stamping the objects into an orchestrated memory of ourselves at this moment. Such as the thinning threads of the past pulling and leading you through the present, now I consciously try to install memories with images I composed, and their constructions of the present.

“We should take a group picture tomorrow with our stickers after we vote,” Emma says. We all agree it’s a good idea. Every opinion and personality trait is representable in a performative image or slogan. “Everyone is asking me who I’m voting for, as if it wasn’t obvious, just look at everything I post. Do I look like someone who would vote for Clifton.”

My phone buzzes on the table making my muscles tense with the rhythm of the phone's vibration, triggering an immediate need to look at what is being notified. A couple of new likes for a photo I posted of myself earlier shows up on my lockscreen. A twinge hits me every time that happens: a certain type of pleasure that fades very quickly. I try not to think about the irrelevance of every Like and how little interaction is needed for it, though my sensibility has still become entirely restructured by these interactions.

To see yourself captured in another faculty than your own – the screen of your phone, or the reflective screen of someone's eyes – is alienating in a different way. Your orchestration doesn’t solidify anything in their perception of you. I am only a witness to myself in reflections. I put the phone back on the table and start listening to the conversation again as they continue making plans for tomorrow.

After many more drinks it’s time to go to the club. On the way I get a notification of a match on tinder. I open the app and see Cameron, the skater who’s into psychedelic beats, and start envisioning a night with this stranger, the possible stories to unfold. I always imagine the meet up is open for any possibility, a coming together of two blank surfaces which could be folded to any shape, but it’s never as climatic or interesting as I imagine it. We all try to escape the situation of our lives with sex or love. Nowadays it’s with someone first presented in images – and not those from their everyday lives, but from documented moments of when life was less mundane. We all seem to fear the mediocrity of our lives and the mediocrity of who we sleep with. But I’ll always try again.

Inside the darkness of one of the dance rooms at the club, I’m dancing, listening to the music closely while feeling the air pushed from the speakers and trying to block out any thought in my head, but of course that never happens. I realise how sedation permeates through most of my actions. Not sedation from drugs, but sedation in stories, in images, in online shopping, drinking, scrolling, sleeping. Sedation in agreeing with my peers, seeing the world or a topic the same way they do and using the same conditions to express it. The world feels a little more digestible and sane with a collective memory, a collective perspective. It’s something like anonymity on a dance floor within a large crowd of people with shadowed faces.

Tonight the constant smell of sweat keeps me focused on my own mission for the night. In the darkness, physical apparitions from the grazing of bodies around me is an experience, a kind of carnality that I sometimes forget exists. To see the subtle qualities of each limb’s movements and live sweat sliding down their skin, turns a switch on from the usual disconnected way I feel attraction. Every person is a body for my immediate gratification and approval. I’ve been craving something deeper than a simple swipe or like, but then that would lead to a deeper rejection. Sex is always the first thing that we offer each other, not even words, not even names come before that when I approach a stranger at a club. I’m presenting myself as a visual dialogue, a figure: take it or leave it. But tonight, it starts on a predetermined dynamic and general understanding of the marketable qualities of our personalities. I wait by the bar for Cameron, where we have agreed to find each other.

“Rosa?” I hear from behind me. I turn around and see Cameron, a guy of average height with very round glossy eyes, not quite as cute as in his photos though it doesn’t take much seduction or time until we are making out and moving along. As things progress through the night, we find ourselves going to my place in the morning.

It’s our moment for physical expression, except nothing is being said. It’s almost clinical, an operation of insertion and what needs to take place for that to happen. It’s your own physical noise you’re listening to, or trying to make up to compensate, while being licked or touched. Later, he gets up to the edge of the bed to get his weed pen. He keeps turning his head with a smirk, it seems like he is trying to figure out what to say, how to react to my steady indifference.

“You know we could use the circumstances of the situation to our benefit. We can share things we might not usually share.” We both know this will be our only night together.

“I suppose so,” I think out loud.

“So tell me what do you think about? What’s something you see, something you feel, that you haven’t told anyone.” He asks laying back down, blowing the thick vapour from his mouth. I think about it for a minute. I have one answer, an impersonal one about something political, but am trying to find another, something more of my own, to genuinely be a part of this experiment.

“I don’t know,” I say, still thinking.

“Come on, anything.”

“Sometimes… I feel disconnected from people. I can’t relate to people sitting across from me or people I know well. I might be engaged in the conversation one moment and the next shut down and feel I’m watching everyone on TV or behind a screen, and to bring myself to the moment I take a picture of something around me.” We stay quiet for a little bit after I spoke. I don’t feel any different from telling this to him, a stranger. It has lost weight, if anything, sharing it with him rather than just living it, or what I imagine if I would have told someone I knew.

“Don’t we all feel that way?” he asks me. I have to think about that, I’ve never seen it that way before.

“I don’t know. Is that why you get a kick out of asking strangers these kinds of questions?” I retaliate.

“I guess so.” He takes another hit from his pen while contemplating. I thought he would say more, but he doesn’t. Our conversation dwindles down into us falling asleep facing each other.

The following morning with Cameron gone, I stand in the kitchen leaning against the counter sipping my coffee. I scroll through Instagram to see everyone’s posts with their “I voted” stickers, which makes me antsy to go and get the same photos. I put my phone down on the counter and look out my window to see more adverts for clothing stores and a new dating app. People walk down the street while talking on their phones, I see groups of girls wearing variations of the same clothes, and children looking down on tablets while their parents push their strollers. All passing each other with quick glances or no attention at all, yet they all share the streets, the neighbourhood, the city network. Are our reactions and how we coexist with each other different from online? Most interactions outside closer friends are based on immediate impressions from visual cues, and superficial interaction. The line seems to fade more and more, though maybe there was never a line between physical and online life. New technologies and creations of convenience become another appendage, another surface in a chamber of mirrors, copying and reflecting endlessly the slightly morphed face of the human condition. I have to find again what I seem to have lost, an understanding of humanness, of myself. Maybe then I’ll find the differentiation.