I got on the N train at 57th Street on Friday afternoon, the old familiar line, to transfer at 14th street to go back to Queens. I had spent the afternoon after having lunch with a friend visiting from Salt Lake City who I hadn't seen maybe since 2015. 2015? We both said, in shock. Yes, 2015, a year that is somehow almost ten years ago. I recalled that the years since 2020, and even the latter half of the 2010s, fail to sound like "real" years to me, in the same way I'm sure it was the case for people a generation above me to imagine the concept of entering college in "2008", years that, once you turn the age of about 24 or so, start to make you feel "old," which is to say, like you are aware of the concept of time, of its weights and pulleys and the way it drags you around like a loose curtain on a stage, flapping pathetically through the air.
How to make sense of the concept of a city called "Salt Lake"? I've been away so long, and had to explain it as a concept to so many people who come from so far outside of its milieu, that it now feels, I'm sorry to say, like more of a dream than a place, like a weird story someone told me to put me to sleep as a child. As the friend and I talked, over well-oiled pad Thai and free spring rolls that neither one of us ate, I remembered what it felt like to have what most people I've met in New York have —friends and a context nearby, a college you went to within driving distance, a dispersion of most people you know somewhere roughly adjacent. Like you are "from" somewhere, part of some larger neighborhood, even if sprawling across a state or two. Utah was the only place I had this, or will have it, I would guess.
Once in a while, as at a fourth of July gathering last week with some friends of a friend, I will meet people who, for whatever reason, have "spent time" in Utah. After repeated dashings of my naiveté, I have stopped expecting it to be for any other reason than because of expensive outdoor sports or some kind of other privileged novelty. "What's the absolute WEIRDEST PLACE I could say I have lived, as a bit?" The people I met this time went to Utah for college, and for rock climbing — the climbing of rocks or constructed simulations of rock walls, not for the purpose of escaping danger, harvesting rare eagle eggs, or ascending to heaven, but for some other reason.
I got on the train and opened my book, which, to be annoying, I'm trying to spend more time with as opposed to my phone, whose purposes are both numbing and nefarious. Whose truths and transmissions more frequently make me feel like I have worsened or sped up the passing of time, that its losses are more absolute. The way I sometimes now have to look at my "camera roll," the recent photos I've taken, as a way to remind myself of what happened each day of the past week, past month, past year.
Sitting to my right was a young woman with hair dyed blonde and with dark roots, wearing a red tank top, white sandals, and jean shorts, along with the kind of eye makeup reminiscent of what girls meaner and cooler than me would wear in ninth grade. I squinted, and tried not to tell if she was wearing the outfit in the way where it was an expensive and intentional homage to the concept of middle America (working class drag being VERY in right now, in Brooklyn) or whether it was just an outfit. I couldn't tell.
At Georgetown, I regrettably took a few classes within the core of a program that was essentially a night school for employees or prospective applicants of the U.S. intelligence community ("the I.C.," one internship recruiter kept breezily namedropping to me once over the phone, sounding disgusted when I, as if with an invisible hat brim turning shamefully in my hands, had to ask what he meant). We learned, in one class, about a method of intelligence collection that, despite its long and technical sounding name, basically amounted to looking over people's shoulders at what they're typing on their phone, or looking at people's laptop screens. Another intelligence collection method, with another similarly overstated name, amounted to following people into buildings, and then being inside the building. I always think of this when I engage in the unhappy habit of glancing at other people's smartphone screens on the subway.
The girl in shorts had an almost finished Starbucks coffee dangling in her right hand, and with her left thumb, flicked through Instagram stories faster than I've ever seen anyone do it, or done it myself. She flicked and flicked and flicked her thumb, with its professional splodge of cobalt blue nail polish, scurrying down a long hallway of doors — some beach, some coffee, some meal, some well-laden plate, some outfit, some car, some selfie, some selfie. She flicked up, and Snapchat appeared, whose interface I had forgotten. She flicked up again, back to Instagram, pausing to take in a targeted ad for some pants. And then she tore through another round of stories, fast enough that I barely felt bad for weirdly looking at some stranger's phone. Do people do this? Is everyone taking in ALL possible Instagram stories with the attitude of being assigned homework, or the pursuit of satisfaction that comes with completion, ridding oneself of the little pulsating red number that says THERE IS SOMETHING LEFT TO BE CONSUMED!
Can anyone explain why we don't dream about our phones? Someone recently said online. I realized it was true: I frequently dream of messages I'm sending, or things I'm reading, but I've never envisioned the actual phone's interface, its screen, or held it in my hands, while in a dream. Watching a stranger's phone behavior — or even holding and observing a close friend's phone, which feels always warm and greasy, comforting yet embarrassing, like holding a newborn infant someone's handed you— is the closest I think we get.
Gorgeous.