She Turned the Phone Face Down - A Short Story

She lays down in the middle of her bed, phone glowing against the darkness of the room. Her thumb slides automatically up and down through a slurry of vapid content.

A screenshotted meme that means nothing, right above it, a provocative video engineered to be loud and disrupting. Just under the rot, an ad pops up for something she didn’t know she wanted until five seconds ago. Finally, a thirst trap framed like intimacy, sultry eyes meeting the camera as if he can see her through the glass.

Then—between all of the madness—certain information leaks through.

Screenshots and threads, emails and receipts. Long-feared truths surfacing in pieces, scattered between inside jokes and sponsored links. Confirmations of things she always suspected but hoped weren’t real. Things that make her stomach drop even as the feed keeps going, indifferent to the what is being revealed.

The worst part is how quickly the horror is swallowed by the next meaningless clip.

Her phone is hot now, heat seeping into her palm, the battery at a weak 5%. She keeps scrolling, her hands won't detach. Stopping the barrage of information overload feels like she's letting go of control. Her nervous system is flooded and her former well fed mind and heart becomes still.

The anger is there, along with the pressure behind her eyes. Proof stacked on proof stacked on proof of atrocious events out of her control, with nowhere to put it, taking up space in the grand bookshelves of her brain.

Finally, with a gargantuan amount of effort, she turns the phone face down in fatigue. The loss of the blue light feels wrong at first. Her thoughts rush in where the noise was. Images linger: faces, headlines, bodies, collective outrage.

Across the room, her desk waits. There’s a worn journal with a bent corner, a pen she’s had forever, the barrel smoothed from use. She picks it up and feels its weight, its tactile and solid. The pen feels more real than the phone, like it belongs to the world. Compared to the phone, it feels like it actually exists.

She sits and opens the journal to a blank page. Her wrist hesitates, then moves. Ink begins to flow from a deep place, pouring every rotten thing that was transmitted into her and onto the blank spread.

The act of moving the pen slows her breath, drops calmness back into her body. 3 pages full of gunk, the handwriting getting increasingly sloppier.

The anger doesn’t vanish completely (she hopes that it will one day) but it changes shape. It becomes heat and energy instead of paralysis.

Hours later, she feels herself return to center. Yet she knows she can't move forward by ignoring the outer world completely or questioning whether what she witnessed was real. By reclaiming her power from the screen, she chooses to pick a different path.

As she closes the journal, she pauses. She knows she can’t be the only one doing this. The only one choosing to step back from mind bending psychological games that she was entered into against her will. She doesn't want to be alone in doing the work to rewire her body to return back to joy, love and celebration of life and creation.

She sighs and sprawls on the bed, feeling a mix of shameful, guilty and other arrogant emotions, yet she wonders—softly, hopefully—

Are the others like her?

This is my first short story, and there are more to come. If this piece made you feel something, you’re welcome to leave a small tip in support of this work. It helps me keep writing, slowly and emotionally.