shadows of scale

Dappled with sun, the custody arrangements made in summer fell surreptitiously apart in the frigid pale air of mid-winter as Patricia Durell found herself biting fingernails again, pacing carpet again; in and out of a series of work calls—all of them video—she found herself helplessly & rigidly bounding across the space of her apartment, back and forth again, over and over, and what else was there to do? Sling her laptop frisbee-style out the open seventh-floor window? Well then she would be out of a job.

There hadn’t been any legal agreement, per se, and Thomas had taken the toddler to god knows where. But, biting her tongue hard with the thought, Sabrina was set to return on Valentine’s Day as they were both single and alone and lonely and Sabrina felt a need to evacuate campus with its acres and acres of annually scheduled public displays of affection.

As if underlining (or punctuating) an empty line in a filled journal, city sounds and the wind make themselves so steady and so clear when there’s a lack in the soul. There’s something smelling of an ending in the wind’s battering of a windowpane. What is taken and What remains.

The V-Day reunion was well-enough but little felt like victory; neither mother nor daughter approached the topic of Ladislaw, or even Sabrina’s father, as she knew the answers to the questions already without having to beat around the bush. She shot off a text to her roommate back in Ithaca (sitch is bad it seems) and her roommate saw the text, didn’t respond; their mutual NSA agent also said nothing but leaned back in his office chair and blew on his cup of freshly brewed black coffee while the fluorescent lights hummed and swirled dull above the windowless office while a housefly circled and clung to the tubes a baby monkey with its plush doll.

I could say, for myself, that I’m no more than that housefly circling the white florescence, disconnected as I am from all of this narrative I’m also indifferent to bouncing off of plastic over and over again, expecting something purifying to come out of it. Nesting dolls have a grip on my imagination: each level is a part of a whole, of a grand narrative of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. It’s not something we can help, being so enraptured by these narratives of scale, but what is there to do about it? Become better people? We enjoy a world image. We enjoy levels to things. The minutiae of everyday obstacles fit neatly into the grand scale of our expectations and hangups if we look upon them as a third party. Without the small hooks and nails in walls, we will have nowhere to hang the coats of yesterday’s aspirations to carry them over to tomorrow—what would become of us if we let it all go? But I fear I already have let it all go. Plastic and glass gives no warmth. Looking over all of this, clacking my keys on top of it, I find only cold detachment from all of it.

Sabrina Durell also kept her distance from the intimate tension of her mother’s city apartment. She had no business instigating anything even if she understandably sided with her mother instead of her now so-long’d father in terms of her baby brother—of course she cared for the little person who bumped in and out of her life on holidays and breaks between studying—but she chose to keep herself ambiently attached instead of dedicated fully so that when she returned to campus on Monday she was in fine enough spirits to throw herself back into her studies and into the depthless routines that make the American university system what it has become in the twenty-first century.

She attended classes with a laptop in front of her where she drafted homework for the class she would attend later in the day. Always one step ahead, she pitched bars and clubs on groupchats in her final discussion group before rushing back to shower and dress so she could sit at a table at a bar with her phone in front of her face to ward off the more drunk underclassmen who tended to think so highly of themselves before the truth of campus isolation came creaking in from the shadows of the void that existed beyond.

Sabrina’s was no singular experience; there was little depth in her life, but who can blame her? The pain of ruptures only emerge when the ruptures were crossed and dotted.

Two or three years passed rather quickly and Sabrina Durell’s life separated in two like a latte left too long on the pass. Sabrinatheteenagebitch became a small-scale online personality and then Sabrina Durell became the maintainer of said online personality. Her mother, who recently remarried (to junior marketing guru Shel Bolicrum), went on attaching herself to the online personality Sabrinatheteenagebitch without realizing it wasn’t really her daughter that she was attaching her affection to. This isn’t to say she was looking with affection to a complete stranger —Sabrinatheteenagebitch’s sense of humor was very much Sabrina’s—but there was something essential missing in the relationship which never made itself clear to either of them. Sabrina’s NSA agent, too, had no reason to suspect that Sabrina Durell had become two people instead of one, that she had ruptured in ways unique to representations and the maintainers of said representations.

Sabrina rediscovered her own reflection almost daily, that of her falsies curling up in a nice curve and her dimples accentuated her face nicely. She didn’t put thought into the appearance. It was like a snag that caught her shirt when she pulled it on or took it off, something of a minor friction dealt with as easily as it was forgotten once the heat of friction had passed. She found herself a job where she would sit at home and delegate email communications between a team of java vibecoders and a small team of marketers. She sat on her couch, at the kitchen table, and in her bed. She grew her online following steadily. Sabrinatheteenagebitch became the figure which maintained relationships with the other representations of people, each maintained by their own real-world interlocutors who, in their own ways, also came to take their digital shadows for their persons.

As such, there’s no telling how Sabrina Durell herself actually lived.

But a message request appeared in Sabrinatheteenagebitch’s inbox one day near the end of November during a particularly stressful year from someone who may have been her younger brother, Ladislaw, now grown into a teenager. Sabrinatheteenagebitch passed this DM along to Sabrina Durell who examined the account for a brief moment and couldn’t quite tell whether this person held any relevance to her. The DM thus went unanswered. RedBike_Lad clearly held no sway over Sabrina Durell’s digital shadow. When the thought appeared like a soft breeze one morning to make an attempt to bridge the divide that her father had created so long ago between herself and this person underneath this other shadow, she found that there was no real way to bridge the divide between her and this other person so long as Sabrinatheteenagebitch stood in the way, and Sabrinatheteenagebitch had no relations to this RedBike_Lad so, when she considered reaching out, the anonymity of both figures, only outlines of people against the backlit screens, stood clearly in the way of making much—if any—progress.

There came a day, eventually, when Patricia Durell stopped pacing around her city apartment, and at her funeral, surrounded by strangers, excluding her remarried and now-quite-distant husband, Sabrina came into contact with a young man with similar dimples to her. She said the right things and they never hugged or said anything more than what needed to be said. A coldness existed between them. The only hard feelings were guilt on the one hand and rejection on the other, but both had faded over time and long waves of overstimulation into a sort of ambient numbness, into the sort of personal conspiracy that grips a person in the early hours of morning. And as the streetlights begin to fade, months and years passing, the shadows of the two Durells began to settle snug into the landscape actively losing its acuity to the growing light of day.

But what, might we ask, were their shadows so preoccupied with in the neon nighttime of their living if not one another? Like all shadows, Sabrinatheteenagebitch and RedBike_Lad were preoccupied mainly with their casters. Bordering on obsession, even, the shadows of Sabrina and Ladislaw Durell recounted the appearances and the seasons of their prisoners over the course of years. If the two of them had any real relationship in this world, it was with the bars of their cage who, in their defense, doted and pleased them incessantly, shouted and heaped praised of their achievements to any outside eye or ear that would bend to see or listen. While the world underneath the world maintained its steady course of a sad state of affairs, the Durells’ shadows cried out in excitement about everything and about nothing at all while outside the palaces and outside the shanties and outside the stores and outside the morgues and outside the hotels and outside the stadiums and outside the homes the wind bore down in greater and greater claws to rip the dust away from window frames, searing the world with the sand it might need to one day rebuild itself one particle at a time.