You waste time watching old commercials on YouTube, scrolling through them, half-heartedly remembering the way you felt as a child, how you must have felt – you don’t really remember at all. It’s a memory of a feeling you could have had or should have had. You cover the camera on your laptop and hope Jeff Bezos isn’t watching you. The Cindy Crawford Coke commercial is actually a Pepsi commercial: you remembered the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle even though the can is the whole point of the ad. You aren’t one of the little white boys in that commercial either, or a cowboy smoking Marlboros. But you still want to be as cool as a rum and coke. And just as popular.
You post thirst traps, trash for other people to look at – and maybe do more with – while refusing to take the kitchen trash to the curb. You wait for people to inflate your ego with little images of hands clapping, of fire and hearts and eggplants and peaches. Of little red faces sweating with their tongues out and the occasional little yellow face making a shocked O. They’re not shocked and neither are you but talking about sex with strangers kills time very well.
You waste time sending memes to every acquaintance you think will think they’re funny and even some who you know won’t laugh at all. You don’t vacuum. You do not water your plants. You think about how they need water. You don’t do the dishes. You don’t read the book you were going to read. You watch TikTok videos of drag queens.
You waste time playing games on your browser. You play games on your phone. You do the Wordle. You waste time clicking through a series of pages that advertise Power Couples You Didn’t Know Were LGBTQ+. You already know all of them, except for the ones who are not actually famous and definitely not power couples. You tie your sneakers and take yourself out to the curb. It’s hot and humid and you cool your face with an ice cube that melts rapidly on contact with your face. You go back inside and scroll through Instagram, Grindr, Snapchat, Twitter, X. You wait, face melting.