Roumina Parsa
Roumina Parsa is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She appeared in the 2024 Emerging Writers’ Festival, was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously featured in Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.
The internet has a beating heart and it goes to the rhythm of –
When you don’t open an app for a while it will gain sentience. I tried taking a week off of social media and got to five days (also a working week for the unemployed) and each day my phone came more alive talking that internet language:
Redacted and 64 other accounts you follow have posted on Instagram. Redacted uploaded a story on Facebook. Redacted recently shared a new reel. Do you know redacted? Do you want to sync redacted from your contacts? Do you want to follow redacted? Do you want to hold redacted’s hand and tell them your secrets and braid each other’s hair?
It reminds me of when I was 12 and had my first blow of agoraphobia, though I didn’t know then that’s what it was, an event made up of no understanding and all experience. The suddenly inability to go to school, to sleep alone, to exist as a human how I had before. It was all very dramatic. My parents were forced to worry about me in a way they’d never needed to and it didn’t suit any of us well.
I had to go see the school counsellor who sat me down and said much of the same as my apps; that my friends were making new friends, and things were changing, and I was being left behind. At 12 you can’t know what that all means. The passage of time, the concept of things moving on without you. It just sounds like being dead. And what’s a 12 year old supposed to do with that? What’s the threat of time passing when you can only perceive forever?
The counsellor was too old and too mean to change me anyway. So far removed from the quietness of a child’s defiance to understand it was only made of fear, all the way through.
Is that what you want? For all your friends to forget about you? She’d asked.
Oh brother, I’d thought, my stomach hurts.
In abstinence from the apps my hands grew idle and my mind quiet from the voices of others and I felt again in an old way what it meant to be singular. At the centre of your own world but on the periphery of that great other, where everything was happening and where you were not. It made me think of Bane and his monologue in the Dark Knight Rises – him telling Batman how he was born in a pit, and that made him one with the darkness on a level that
Batman never could be; he who chose it. I couldn’t decide which one I was, Bane or Batman – the chosen or the chooser of the deep dark.
The apps pierced through: are you sure you don’t know redacted?
I didn’t know redacted. I knew my whispering girl on YouTube, the only app I decided to keep using, staying away from the comments and the shorts. I have a premium account on it that I worked real hard for, downloading a proxy to connect to Turkey where I could get it cheaper so someone could whisper-read me a book and tap on its cover as I fell asleep without an ad interrupting.
[I do often consider what my ancestors must think of me, the rotten fruit of their labours. All those soldiers and mothers and otherwise wounded warriors looking down at all this (I’m pointing, round and round, at my many comforts) and seeing someone crouching beneath a tall ceiling, collapsing under the weight of nothing. It’s fine though, really, and if it’s not I can bring the ceilings down lower, and if my ancestors hate that too – well, what can any of us do for the aches of the dead?]
My whispering girl only chooses books I’m pretentious enough to think are stupid, lending themselves so easily to boredom and the eyes closing. She’s younger than me but/ and pregnant and has started inviting everyone to take a deep breath with her at the beginning of her videos. Naturally, I comply. Thinking, nothing is happening and maybe that’s it.
I started wondering though if anyone from my apps missed me. If anyone had even noticed I’d been gone. What was the weight of one person’s absence? What was the sound withheld from the collective of voices? I knew what I was asking was much bigger, the tiniest babushka doll in the set of worries I was too defiant to open.
For those who’ve seen it, you know Bane’s monologue ends on this, a note of defiance. But maybe you hear the fear also, all the way through, when he says: I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!
When I log into my apps again it’s to see the photos my friends had posted of us – the friends the counsellor had long ago threatened I’d lose. They picked the ugliest ones but it’s fine because I’m in them, because I was there. Because I wasn’t born here; not in this darkness, not in this pit, not even in this country. I was brought here by a patchwork of choices, made by and for me, and that’s the least important part actually. The darkness doesn’t belong to me, or to you. It holds no loyalties, it promises no victories. It denounces itself with its own emptiness. It falters with what it means to use as a threat; some substance of the very end.
That’s only for the dead though, for us alive and itching and and online and pleading, it is still redacted.