Tweeting Through Spaghettification
I’m thinking of leaving Twitter soon, which, after writing that out, solidifies that I absolutely will not leave it. Instead, I will linger around like a weird relative at a funeral luncheon. And when I finally have no business being there anymore, and will simply walk out without saying goodbye. Then it will just be something I used to do. I used to tweet. And then it got stranger and more obtuse than it was before. A funhouse of the funhouse we were already in. Even more cruel virgins, and more Johnny Depp fanatics with profile pictures featuring a zoomed-in iris.
Since 2009, I had my Twitter. It was an appendage—ugly and heavy and perfect, horny and wise. My little tweets and videos—an archive of something, I’m not really sure. what yet. Something precious and humiliating.
The scalding war of my twenties, where I would blackout alone on Yellowtail merlot on a weeknight, and tweet inexplicable things like the YouTube link to the final, weepy scene of Gladiator at one am with the caption “A good scene.” A good scene. I’d wake up in my piss before work, the next morning, and see what I had posted and be more concerned about the ten or so likes I got on it than my soaked bed. Were these faves out of pity? Did they know I had awful brown wine teeth when I tweeted that, and passed out in TGIFridays potato skin chips? It didn’t matter. If it wasn’t there, it didn’t exist. It was cozy tweeting. Maudlin wino-gay tweeting.
I did love Twitter, though. I loved what everyone tweeted. I loved being jealous and awestruck. I loved the porn. I loved the cataclysms. The outrage and takes! The stupidity. My own stupidity. My dumb meanness. I loved my dumb beautiful Twitter.
Then I watched people take turns announcing their departures when Elon Musk took over, decrying what the site had become, which I thought was very funny.
I might be leaving, they said, so just in case, you can follow me on Mastodon.
I watched them return. I watched them tweet that they were back, or pretend they never left. I said nothing. I posted through it, smug and ironic. When they returned, I was relieved. They had given back in. They had returned to be with me in Hell
Then came the mass firings of Twitter programmers and maintenance crews, and rumors that the whole site would be gone by nightfall. The glitching started. There was panic disguised as jokes. And I judged until I too felt it. The Rapture had started and I wasn’t ready to leave this terrible place. I would grieve it. I would be lesser without it. So, I stood up, pure and young, yelling out my hideous bargain: while there is still time, please know that I am on Instagram, and you can follow me there. Come and let me show you my splendor and terror. Bear witness to me.
Then nothing happened. Twitter remained, and back in I came, plodding like a mournful horse. I deleted my goodbye and kept on posting; back to my Twitter, my familiar horror, a cyst siphoning off my insides for a thousand years to come.
I can’t leave now. I can’t not see what awaits on Big Dumb Twitter: this shrieking nightmare of confounding hate. A formless mass, terrible and expanding into the sky, blocking out the sun.
The world is ending and I can’t stop tweeting.