My Lent of Unrest and Quiet Desperation

Reflections on doom-scrolling, trying to be happy, and being real about what phone time is: addiction.

Portrait of a Young Woman in White, by Jacques-Louis David, National Gallery of Art. (Very bad canva graphic by… moi?)

It snowed here in the city, on February 13th. The flakes started before dusk, sticking to the fire escapes, car windshields, copper bird feeders, until the warmer places slowly turned white as well. By dawn, the flakes had morphed from thick clumps into dandruff-like flecks. And then it stopped. A few mourning doves crammed onto the small window ledge, coo cooed, buried their heads into the thick plumage of their bodies. And then the plop-plops of the water followed, the snow already melting, dripping from the gutter onto the railing of the fire escape. Within a few hours the backyard was bare, the trees were mostly brown again. In the park nearby parents were pushing sleds, but the slope was mostly streaks of dead grass by that point. Someone had built a snowman and topped it with a traffic cone, but the neck was folding inwards, and the head was buckling over the chest. People gathered around it, taking pictures, selfies, but everyone was very careful around it. It was like they thought their breath would melt it.

There had been maybe three or four inches of snow in the morning. By four or five in the afternoon it was all about gone. From the train leaving the neighborhood the rooftops were clear, the roads congested but normal, the windows covered with beads of water and fog. At everyone’s feet were little puddles, growing in size, shifting across the floor when the train shook through the tunnel leading underground. Once the train stopped people would stand up, gather their things, and exit quietly. The puddles would stay behind, until the very end of the line when no one was in the car anymore, except for the people who need a warm place.

At the end of the line, all the car doors pop open. The intercom barks, and a team of people in bright vests steps in from the station and rake through the train car. They mop the puddles, sweep the floors, pick each candy wrapper off the seats and throw it in a bag. They do this for each train car, until it looks just about as untouched as you can get a subway car to look. And then the riders come in again, with their bags, and their coats, and their boots, and the floor is wet again.

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This year, on February 14th, Ash Wednesday fell on the same day as Valentines Day. It feels like a weird holiday pairing and… I get it. Ash Wednesday seems like a downer. The holiday is essentially about remembering that you, like everyone else, will die someday too. It’s no boxed chocolate, bouquet of roses, or prix-fixe menu.  

But I like Ash Wednesday. It’s completely un-consumptive, the market will never get its grubby hands on the holiday. You’ll never have to buy your Christian friends an Ash Wednesday gift, or even send them a ‘Happy Holiday’ text. The day happens, you shuffle up to the front of the church, you’re told that old line “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and then the priest smudges a trail of ash on your forehead, and then it’s over. The garbage bins aren’t full of wrapping paper and plastic for weeks afterwards. There’s little carbon footprint to the holiday, except for the literal carbon in the ash that later swirls down the shower drain. You get to be one of billions of people who are, if not actively getting their ashes, guiltily wondering if they should go get them. And then you get to walk outside, look at people’s foreheads, and then nod and smile at the people who share the same black mark as you. There’s a kind of unspoken solidarity in that look that I love. I’ve seen it in Seattle, Chicago, Belize City, and now New York. It’s the feeling of being a leaf on the surface of a big river, seeing the other curled leaves floating past you.

But really, what I love most of all is the whole period of Lent. There’s a wonderful theological history behind Lent; Jesus’ 40 days in the desert, the last supper & the betrayal, followed by the crucifixion and then the resurrection. But really, I’m not thinking about theology when it comes to Lent (maybe I should be). I’m a bad Catholic, and I’m very American about it, which means that I believe I can take the parts of Catholicism that I like (stained-glass, choral music, liberation theology) and remove it completely from the other parts of it that I despise. One of those things that I like is the habit of ‘giving something up’ for Lent. It’s something that I’ve done since I was a kid, when I’d reliably give up pop (soda) for 40 days. When people ask me what my favorite drink is, I usually say coffee, or beer, but the best answer is probably ‘the first coca cola after Lent’. It is heavenly, divine. Try it sometime. There was an idea that I learned here early; that sometimes restraint is good, and that abstinence from following impulses can even be healing, or possibly revelatory.   

But Lent has morphed for me over the years. Gone is revelation, replaced by optimization. It’s turned into a kind of New Year’s Part II, a second chance at suddenly course correcting the direction of my life. On Ash Wednesday-Eve, I sit and reflect on the dozens of overly ambitious New Years resolutions that have already flamed out, and I try to find the source of what went wrong. There are familiar (and probably common) scapegoats. For a few years it’s been videogames, or Twitter, or liquor, and before that it was dating-apps. Sometimes it’s all of these things at once. A real moveable feast of things that I blame for all of my troubles.

I was going to give up videogames again this Lent. I was tired of gaming alone, replaying the same scenarios over and over. But giving up only videogames didn’t feel like enough. I said something in my journal to the effect of ‘usually I treat Lent as an exacto knife, maybe this year it should be a bomb.’ This was how I felt on February 13th, Fat Tuesday, the day that it snowed here in the city. I was stuck working, sitting at my desk, listening to music. Somewhere in between Phoebe Bridgers and Cat Clyde came John Prine, a song of his that I’ve always loved; Spanish Pipedream. The song is a fun, simple story. A soldier is in a bar somewhere, on his way elsewhere, but then of course he meets a beautiful woman. Just as he’s about to leave she comes up to him, dancing, and says;

Blow up your TV / throw away your paper / move to the country / build you a home / plant a little garden / eat a lot of peaches / try to find Jesus / on your own.

If I’m ever asked, ‘how should a life be?’, then it’s something like those lyrics. Which is ironic, or just sad, because I’m about as far from living those lyrics as a person can get. I’m addicted to the modern version of the TV and the paper: screens (who isn’t), in all their varieties. I’m stuck in a very large city that I very much dislike. I’m hemorrhaging rent money on an apartment that leaks every day. My garden consists of a few house plants that bend weakly towards the windows. I don’t eat peaches. And Jesus. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to find him. But wherever he is, if he’s out there, he feels very far away.

I decided to orient my Lent around the song, in some way, it seemed like a fun challenge. I’d try to blow up the distractions in my life by turning off my phone during the day, keeping it in another room in the evenings when I was trying to read. I set guidelines for YouTube, the three news sites I refresh each hour, and the burner account I still use to occasionally lurk on Twitter. I borrowed a ton of books from the library. I promised that I wouldn’t binge-listen to podcasts when walking around, and instead I’d actually… listen to things (gasp). I wouldn’t move to the country, but I’d go hiking on the weekends, and I’d try to plot my long-term escape from the city. On the windowsill I’d start some herb seedlings for a summer fire escape garden. I’d try to eat a little healthier, a-la peaches. And Jesus. I left him alone, I twisted that line into something metaphorical and vague, like ‘finding inner peace’, or more honestly ‘being incredibly productive’.

I came up with all of this, on February 13th, fat Tuesday, while outside the snow was melting, and I took the melting ice as some sort of sign, as if there was some icy part of me that was being thawed. And for a few days I was pretty good about my Lenten promises. I kept the phone out of my bedroom. I left my earphones at home whenever I stepped outside. I planted herbs for the summer in little buttons of soil on a plastic tray. I roasted lots of colorful vegetables and cooked recipes out of physical cookbooks. I packed my backpack with all the things I’d need for a day trip. I even wrote for a little bit. I bundled up some ideas for newsletter writing, but perhaps a bit more ambitiously I picked up fiction again. I had the sensation that I was steadily climbing up a hill, gaining elevation, going somewhere. I didn’t know where, precisely, but it felt like forward progress. If only I kept moving, I’d reach a kind of vista point where I could turn around and see all that was behind and then ahead of me.

But then I tumbled down again. I was reading a book on one of these late evenings when I remembered; oh I don’t have to do this! I put the book away, pulled out my phone, scrolled for ungodly hours, and then the next day I listened to podcasts while out on my walk, and then I stopped cooking and started scavenging frozen-meals from the bodega nearby, and then I slept through an early morning hiking trip, and suddenly I was sitting down trying to write and it felt like I was wrestling with language, but losing.

In the past it’s usually been writing that has pulled me out of the worst moments. But every time that I tried to write over Lent, it wasn’t working. Whatever language and form that I had been using in the past wasn’t clicking, it didn’t feel real, and I had the sense that if I struggled, and gnawed, the situation would only get worse. My brain, my dumb lizard-brain, was telling me to follow the kind of advice they give movie characters stuck in quicksand; be still, don’t move! So I kept still, and didn’t thrash about. In the evenings of uneventful days, I’d close my laptop after work, go into my bedroom, and scroll. On good days I’d maybe read a page or two, get out of the apartment briefly, sit in my reading chair, and look out the window, watching the planes leaving the airport nearby, like some kind of sleepy cat on window duty. And before I knew it, it was March, and then the end of winter. Nothing, as far as I could tell, had changed. I was right where I was before Lent had started. I didn’t even have the ashes to show for it.

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It’s a very ridiculous thing that knocked me backwards; YouTube, one of the platforms that I tried to set boundaries around. The ‘recommended’ tab of my YouTube account is a good indication of where my mental health is at in any given moment. At the beginning of Lent, YouTube was recommending interviews of Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, Karl Ove Knausgård, longform video essays by Lefty youtubers like Contrapoints, lots of videos of waterfalls for some reason. This is about as good as my YouTube algorithm gets.

One of these evenings, however, I was working through an idea for a piece. I had gone to Las Vegas in early February, before Lent started, staying with my family in one of the casinos on the strip. When I was there, I had withdrawn a bit of money out of the bank, with the idea that I’d play around with some of the slots on the floor, for research. I’d at one point won about $300 from one bet; not a miniscule amount for someone who works in Nonprofit Inc! ‘Research’ turned into ‘Oh, I liked that feeling, maybe I can make it happen again?’ So I dove into the world of slots. I did late-night research on the odds of all the different machines on the strip. The next day, I strode to the casino with purpose. I played on a machine themed after Willy Wonka, which is really only a gigantic screen that’s curved in a way to take up your entire vision. When I launched a mini game on this slot, the screen was full of Gene Wilder singing about how I was entering a world of pure imagination. The Oompa-Loompas waddled across the screen, singing. Veruca Salt was sucked down a laundry chute.

And on another slot, eighty dollars later, I eased into a Bavarian-themed machine with a pair of lederhosen-wearing twins schuhplattling around the rows of numbers. When I hit one of the smaller penny-slot jackpots on that machine, the animated stein began to pour beer down the rows of numbers, seemingly into my lap. Heavy tuba music played as the digits went up. While the music was playing, I tapped my feet. I couldn’t help it. It was the most musically touched I had felt in months. I was also drinking, a few beers in (duh), but it felt like I was in the real tents at Munich. It didn’t matter that I had been to the real Oktoberfest once, sipping pilsners in the Munich sun as I watched real families and children twirl in their dirndls; this felt like the actual thing, but somehow better, because it overwhelmed every sense of feeling that I had, the screen was so all-encompassing. And also I was making money. From the screen the voices slurred Ein Prosit, Ein Prosit in a cartoonish accent, and I felt so not-alone, so full of warmth, even though I was sitting hunched in front of a giant LED screen pushing a blinking red-button for what must have been hours.

But when I was opening YouTube that one night, early on in Lent, I was thinking of one slot machine, one that I hadn’t played. Nearly all of the casinos on the strip are crammed with the same games, the same bells and whistles, and there was one sound that kept hitting me: buh-bah-dum, buh-bah-dum. The sound of trampling hooves. The casino floors are full of slots modeled on the old American West; Buffalo Gold, Buffalo Gold Revolution, Buffalo Gold Max Power. When there’s a jackpot hit on one of these machines you can tell right away, because it echoes across the whole casino floor. A computer voice yells ‘Buffalo!’, and then music begins to play; a short little diddy for the small hits, and Strauss’ Radetzky March for the larger hauls. I heard it in all of the dozen-plus casinos that I walked into; ‘Buffalo! Buffalo’. The sound was so overwhelming in the window-less rooms on the strip that I could still hear the trampling when I laid in bed in the evening. It was on my mind all the way back East, even as I settled into my apartment again, thousands of miles away from the buffaloes.

It felt like the nexus of some kind of halfway interesting piece, maybe an essay or maybe a short story. Nothing too wild. But I wanted to feel it again, not just rely on the hazy memory. So late one evening I eased into the couch, pulled up YouTube, searched for the buffalo slot machines. There were thousands of results; shorts, livestreams, 40- or 50-minute videos riddled with ads that I couldn’t skip. The videos usually begin with a small string of losses, maybe a buck or two at a time for the smaller players, and more for the high-rollers who do upwards of $50 or $100 each bet. But then the videos will catapult into a mini game triggered by collecting a few special golden coins on the screen. With just enough coins you can win additional free games; 5 with 2 coins, 8 with three. In these videos the gamblers keep racking up free games as their wins begin to mount; 60, 70, 90 or more free games, a few thousand dollars easily in the win column, then four, then five. As the mini game continues, the slot player begins hunting for ‘golden buffalo’ heads. Once you reach 15 heads, nearly all the icons in the row turns from wolves, eagles, and deer into buffalo. It’s like the ecosystem of the slot-machine collapses in on itself. From then on, each spin of the machine comes with bigger hits, bigger rewards. In the videos, you can hear the machine yelling ‘Buffalo!’ as the buffalo begin to stretch across all five columns, dozens and dozens of times repeatedly, until all you can hear in the video is the music and ‘Buffalo!’; the recorder muttering ‘Come on Buffalo’, the crowd behind the gambler saying ‘Come on come on buffalo!’, people nervously chattering and going ahhh and ohhhh when another row of buffalo shows up on the screen. A jackpot is hit, the number in the win column spins higher, little coins rain down from the LED screen. Buffaloes trample across a quilt of boxy golden sunsets.

The people who post these videos are mostly professional influencers who go across the country, playing slots and livestreaming the wins, the videos coincidentally sponsored by the casinos they’re playing in. The influencers sell merch; T-shirts, coffee-cups, small bags to carry the hand-pays that you get with the bigger payouts of $1,200 plus. Most of these channels are middle-aged men with t-shirts and receding hairlines, men I will probably look like in ten or twenty years. But a few are college-aged kids, old women who wear surgical gloves at the slots, even young couples that try to do a family-friendly schtick. When you pull up the comments, you’ll see recurring notes; ‘it’s like you’re playing an atm!’, or ‘wow I’ve never seen so many buffaloes in my life’. The comments on these things will send you into an instant spiral.

For a few nights, it became a habit of mine to sit on the couch in the evening, turn off the lights, and watch the golden buffaloes jump around the screen. This was for research, I told myself. I knew what was coming each time; the dud-spins, the mini-games, and then the life-changing jackpots. The amateurs and casual-players are always giddy, the camera shakes and their voices crack and squeal. Whose wouldn’t after making life-changing money? But the professionals in these videos fascinate me the most. They’re almost emotionless; they silently watch as the penny-bets turn into tens of thousands, click to make the reel go faster, skip past the music and the visual gimmicks, see hundreds and thousands of dollars vanish without a second thought.

When I was at the casinos, you’d see this person everywhere. They’d be sitting at the same machine for hours. They had glassy eyes, their neck would stick out past their chest. Their fingers would hover over the buttons. They knew how to click ‘raise bets’ or ‘spin’ without looking. They’d lose a thousand dollars, reach for their pocket, and slide the next batch of hundred-bills into the cash-feeder without looking. The screens would morph and shift, the digital buffaloes would come stampeding out of the mountains towards the gambler, but their eyes would look past it. They had the thousand-yard stare. It was like they could see through the grid of symbols, over the mountains, past the screen. But in the flesh these people look small, frail, not in control. You’d like to sit down with them at the slot, force them to stand up, walk outside, and make them look at the Sierra Nevada’s. Anything to get away from that machine. When you’re watching these people, you think; I am watching a life unravel. This is a grandmother, a father. They were once a baby. There was a point where they were fresh in the world, swaddled in a blanket, and everything was ahead of them. And now they’re sitting alone at a casino, living a life where there is no difference for them between a win and a loss. But surely you would not become that kind of person. You wouldn’t let one good hit hook you to the machine forever. You wouldn’t slip into the screens unthinkingly. Or feel them wrap around your body and block out the light. You would resist. You would be different. When you sit down at the machine, it’s… different. You can control yourself. When you sit alone in a dark room with a rectangle of light in your hands, it’s actually social, what you’re doing. It’s where everyone is. It’s just part of being alive in this era, a generational trade-off. You have to tap into the machine, log on, or else you’ll be in the dark room alone. And you’re not addicted. Yes, you feel the machine buzz against your thigh even when it isn’t there. Yes, you’ve built up superstructures of emotional dramas, tensions, and parasocial connections for the little avatars on the screen that you have not and will never meet. And yes, you can feel a part of you slipping away when you’re neck-deep in the screens. It overwhelms everything; the sun, the patter of rain on the windows, even the real people that you know. If life is rough and choppy, painful and confusing, then the machine promises a staticky flatness that you can float upon. Come here, the machine says, in here you won’t have to worry.  

And you know better. A Faustian bargain. You get the levelling flatness of the screen, yet you lose… something, even if you don’t know exactly what it is. You won’t be hurt in the static, but you also won’t feel, you won’t even really think. This is liberating, at first, a self-directed lobotomy. Until it isn’t anything. You’ll follow the algorithm, thinking that it’s for you, when it’s really for no one. The flatness, the dullness, will creep into everything, pour into different corners of life, until the machine isn’t a thing separate from you but is, somehow, actually you. Life will begin to fit around the machine. And then the screens will begin to feel like life itself. And you’ll have whatever specific version of the screen is for you, and it will feel so special. Like it was hand-crafted for you. A gift. But also a life-vest. Without it, you’d drown. The world is so dark, and scary, the only light is in our hands, in the little rectangles that we stare at. But you know better. Maybe something pulls you out of it; a friend, work, a call from a crush, a group chat with family. But then when that is over with, and when it’s just you in a room, or anywhere, you fall into the screen again. Maybe because there’s something you’re chasing. But probably because it’s what you know. Doom-scrolling and being a bit unsettled online is continuity with yourself. You don’t know how to fill the empty space otherwise.

And it was like that for me, for too long over Lent. Screens, scrolling, and hooves. Everywhere I looked, even while I tried to sleep: Buffaloes. Buffaloes.

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We’re hardwired to do all sorts of things, even things we know might not be all that good for us. I’m the kind of person who is hardwired to stare at a screen and lose myself in it, that much is clear by now. My life is littered with screen-based addictions. And I know and feel deeply, and subconsciously, that these things are bad for me, that the feeling of losing myself in the digital world is kind of like being excavated by an ice cream scooper that I am technically holding. But still I do it because… why? There’s an element of laziness, I suppose. It’s easier to scroll through Twitter than it is to walk with Stephen Dedalus through Dublin. The former is passive, and the latter is active and almost grueling. Even great readers get shipwrecked by Ulysses. But we can probably all recognize that one of these sensations is more empowering, more rewarding than the other. One is the dopamine hit of consumption; the other is a slog that can be deeply life-changing by the end of it. But I think there’s more to it than just laziness, even though I really can be lazy as all hell. I think we return to these digital spaces again and again because there really was some meaning in them once. Somewhere we had a big hit on the machine, and it hooked us in some way. Twitter, that infamous site currently in its death-throes, was never a source of joy for me, just an effective distraction. But Facebook was once deeply meaningful.

I remember the summer before my sophomore year of High school, my first summer with a Facebook account. I went to a training camp with the High school football team, out at a small college campus in the eastern Washington desert. They shoveled us into dingy dorms that had no ventilation in the 95 degree dry heat, with a bunch of 16 year-old guys who never took showers and ate Doritos for breakfast. You can imagine the smell. They’d have us run around in the desert air, flop on our chests, roll around in the dirt, sit in dark training rooms and chant hype-up slogans. But we’d get a few minutes of break each day to visit the student center’s cafeteria. When we’d go there, a group of us would veer to the one desktop that the college had set up in the student center computer room. We’d take turns checking-in on the world, almost all of us opening up Facebook. I can remember the relief of entering my password and seeing the homepage open. Blue, crisp, clean. Back then, the main feed was not loaded with ads. It was a homepage full of real status updates, one-off conversations, and the sidebar was full of ‘pokes’, little nudges that people would send back and forth. When a girl poked you, it felt real, like the digital equivalent of a folded note passed under the desk. Every poke and every message felt soaked with meaning. Here I could message the girl that I liked, while I was stranded in the desert with a few guys that were definitely skinheads. I could see pictures of home-cooked meals, updates from my family, status after status update about the Jonas Brothers and One Direction. Here was a clean, pristine world, where you didn’t have to agonize over what to say to the girl that you kind of liked; you could poke her, again and again, and it did all of the work for you, no more flirting or actual talking necessary. It was like being stranded out in the desert, but able to magically step into a different world that was not quite the one that you knew at home. The digital world was somehow cleaner, simpler, less confusing and taxing. It felt like utopia for an essentially shy, quiet, but yearning person like me.  

But the platform didn’t stay that way. For the hundreds and thousands of hours I spent on Facebook, I probably only have a few minutes that I actually remember. The website became a black hole, an attention vacuum. It went the way of pretty much every digital platform, let alone industry; enshittified until it was a shell. Slowly the platform was loaded with ads, and bots, until it was unusable, until there was no veneer of sociability anymore and it was clear that it existed exclusively to capture your attention. By 2018 or so, when every third post was ‘Donald Drumpf’, or ‘Covfeve’, none of the meaning was there anymore for me. The social-media platform was decidedly anti-social. It was only a distraction, a time-waste, a slot machine that no longer pretended to pay-out. So it wasn’t much of a leap to conclude, ‘I should jump ship’.

But it was incredibly hard to delete the thing and take the plunge. Actually, it was grueling. I remember agonizing over it. I remember where I was when that happened. I was at the apartment I shared with two others on the west side of Chicago. It was only me there, alone with the two cats. I had opened my laptop, ready to delete the Facebook account, but it felt like such an impossible leap. My throat seized up. It felt like a hot towel was being pressed into my forehead. All of this over a social media app. I was such a damn idiot, I thought. It’s pathetic, really.

But I can see now why it felt so grueling. Because it still is, when I think of deleting any of these digital distractions from my life. With a click I was going to be deleting my records, my life. The first DMs with future girlfriends (future exes), the back-and-forth I had with a classmate friend who had later suddenly died in an accident. I didn’t have filing cabinets of letters to fall back on, or physical photo albums to thumb through, only an endless scroll of Facebook messages, status updates, tagged-pictures, half-hearted memes, little bits of code that somehow contained eight years of a life. But It wasn’t merely about deleting the records; it was about removing the source, the megaphone, cutting myself off from a way of communicating. Facebook had become a form that my speech had taken. The way my brain processed the world. The same agonizing happened when I deleted my twitter a bit later. My brain has been shaped by these apps. Perhaps ruined. I used to be a longform person, a kid who used to read great novels and happily play alone. But now I was thinking almost exclusively in fragments, pithy lines, thoughts imprisoned by 140 characters. And the shortest stretch of solitude without the screens would instantly send me into loneliness. And it isn’t only the shape of the thoughts that had changed, but the purpose of them as well.

I used to read books for fun, and write stories earnestly, but on these platforms, and on any screen for that matter, I can feel my thinking twist into perversion. I approach words and writing as if it exists to be picked apart. Nearly every reading online is done in bad faith. I pick fights with people over the most innocuous verbal slip-ups. I half-heartedly follow online trends, trying to form a strong opinion from a headline or article I skimmed. I bought into the line that being loud and angry online was somehow praxis, and not just a helpless wailing. With each scroll, each swipe, I can feel some part of my dignity fall away. But I did it, and do it still, because I was hooked, because I am hooked. Because despite the 99.9% of ugliness in the digital world there was and always is 0.1% of beauty; the online companion that becomes a real-life friend, the tweet or post that truly does feel like poetry, the picture or the video that ingrains itself in your mind. The slivers of beauty are there, and real, and you can convince yourself that by digging further you’re tunneling closer to some deeper beauty, or hidden truth. But there’s nothing there, at the end, because the whole point of the scroll is that it never ends.

That is maybe what’s worst about the scrolls, the screens, the digital hell we’re in. The machines depend on us forgetting the uncomfortable fact of life: that there is an end, to everything. Everything that’s beautiful has a limited time to it – that’s why it’s so precious. Life moves so quickly. Someday I’ll be in a wooden box, or I’ll be a trail of ash that’s scattered over a river or at the base of the mountains. But until that happens, I’d like to hold onto life. I’d like to hold onto the world; to the people that I love, the books and stories that I cherish, the rhythm of the natural world that humbles me. I forget this occasionally, but I feel it completely. It’s a yearning that shapes everything in life with meaning. But when I’m online I feel eternally far away from those convictions. All of life is muted and dulled by the static. Everything becomes a soft, curated expanse. And when I reach for anything, to try and catch my balance, all I can feel is myself slipping, further and further. The digital world is not a ‘cloud’, or an invisible web. It is a specific place; a cavernous place, the ninth layer. An ocean of ice that stretches forever, where all we can do is look down at our reflections in the ice and wonder, silently and to ourselves, why it is that we feel so cold.

But some part of me was able to look past the ice, back in Chicago, on one day. I saved all of the archives of my profile into a zip-file, clicked the delete button on my Facebook profile, and then closed the laptop. I walked out to the balcony, feeling almost dizzy. On the other side of the street was the beginning of a large park, and from there you could see the skyline of downtown far off. One of the cats, skinny and demanding, came out and brushed against my legs. I ran my hand across her back, and I could just tell that she had changed somehow. I’d been too distracted, and hadn’t paid enough attention to her apparently, but I could feel now that her spine was nearly poking through the skin and the fur. I picked her up and put her in my lap, which I had never done before. The cat was dying. I wanted her to feel held.  

In one of the trees I spotted a large shape, clutching one of the branches, watching. It was a peregrine falcon, with a soil-brown head and yellow beak. I’d never seen or heard it before. I was always listening to music or podcasts while I walked, and I had no good reason to look up at the crowns of the trees. The falcon gave a few calls. The first was a loud screech, the last a chirp chirp chirp. I ran my hand through the cat’s fur, behind her head. Her ears perked up, but she was purring, loudly. She was both aware, but at peace, I thought. She knew how to live.

The falcon took off, circling the park before flying far away. A few hours earlier there would have been an impulse to reach into my pocket, take a picture, or fill the spaces of the time with the endless scroll. But with the cat in my lap, no part of me wanted to break the moment, to try and say something witty or clever, and then wait to see how many likes and reposts I could get. None of that mattered now, none of it had ever mattered. I was exclusively thinking, and seeing, and feeling, and it felt good. It felt right. I was sharing a moment with a wonderful, joyous creature that was slipping away from life. There was a kind of warmth that coursed through me. It no longer felt like I was a fish desperately trying to jump the highest in a stream, but a very small pebble on the bank of a river. And I could have stayed there forever, on that river, if only I knew how to find it again.

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When this Easter was approaching, I felt the subterranean Catholic guilt reemerging. I was screwed, I thought; the big guy upstairs – if he even exists – saw what I did, how I had wasted away over the 40 days. He wouldn’t be happy. I wasn’t afraid of God smiting me, though. I was ashamed of myself, ashamed of being such a failure. Here was life, such a precious gift, yet I was spending significant hours watching middle-aged men play slot machines, or hate-reading online personal essays, or investing in pointless online feuds. How did it get to this point, again? I thought that in Chicago, with the jettisoning of Facebook, I had reached a kind of vista, or a point of no turning back, where I’d commit myself to flourishing. But it was so easy to slip backwards. And during Lent I had slipped, fast. I was ashamed that this was my life. I felt myself turning inwards, into the woe-is-me death spiral. I thought I might stay there forever. Maybe I belonged there. American life tells us in no uncertain terms that we deserve to be wherever we end up, even in poverty and incredible loneliness. I was very close to believing in it for myself. Only incredible hollowness and quiet desperation nearly got me to that point.

Shame, of all things, compelled me to go to Easter Vigil Mass, which I wasn’t planning on doing. I felt especially ashamed because I had failed Lent on the first day of it. Despite all my big plans for giving things up, I hadn’t actually gone to Ash Wednesday services on February 14th. I never got my ashes, never went to church, I had other plans instead. The day got away from me, and so I made it a completely secular holiday. It was only as I approached Easter that I grasped the irony in it. And so I made plans to attend Easter Vigil in the late evening before Sunday. I brought a friend, and we sat in the far back of the neighborhood cathedral – a place that I’d never been to before.

Easter Vigil has always been one of my favorite services, second only to Christmas Eve. Unlike all of the other services, Easter Vigil begins in darkness. From the back of the church the priest comes in at the beginning, holding a single lit candle. They sing the Exsultet, a proclamation of sorts about Easter, a song so beautiful that Mozart once said “I would have given all my works to be able to say that I wrote the first line of the Exsultet.” From the priest’s larger candle, he begins to pass the flame. Each parishioner, given a small candle, waits as the candlelight jumps from the back of the church in a slow-moving wave, pew by pew, lighting one candle after the next, until the dark cathedral is gradually filled with flickering flames. And it’s in this dimmed, quiet candlelight that the mass begins with its first reading: The Book of Genesis. The earth was a formless void… let there be light… God saw everything he had made, and indeed, it was very good. I have always felt awed by this mass, even when I was a kid. As a kid I remember holding the candle in my hand, transfixed by the music bouncing through the dark church, not even caring as the hot wax melted onto my hand. This year I couldn’t help but look out at all the candles; hundreds of flames, each individual light held by an individual person with a complex and multilayered life that I would never be able to fully understand. Hundreds of bodies, most of us strangers, people I would probably never see again, but for one night all of us united in a very simple task; holding a candle, bringing light to a dark place. The old, the young. Behind me an older woman had brought her own Lady of Guadalupe votive candles to light. And behind her, a toddler stared up at the black ceiling from behind the candle.

When the readings are done, the service grows louder, back to normal. The lights in the cathedral are turned on. People are told to blow out their candles. You hear hundreds of mouths pucker, and blow at once. And over the bells and the organ music you can out look over the pews. You can see the wisps of smoke leaving their hands. It’s like thousands of little souls, floating up to the rafters.

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I wish I could say it has been all smooth-sailing since then – that I really, and truly, found Jesus, or my secular version of him. That would be a happy ending, but not a good ending. Since Easter I’ve occasionally indulged in the screens, and it’s felt bad when that happens. But in other times, I’ve tried to live a bit differently, a bit more deliberately. On good days, I’ll walk through the neighborhood in the evening. The gardens nearby are popping with blossoms; it was the pink magnolias early in April, and now it’s the cherry blossom branches that are crowding the sidewalks. In the yards you can see multi-colored tulips and yellow daffodils. Even in the early evening, the old Greek ladies in the homes nearby are at work in their gardens; pruning, deadheading, slowly pulling out old weeds. I’ve seen some of these ladies more than once. I try to smile, and nod, hoping they recognize me.

I often head to the park, to try and catch the sunset. There’s a stretch of walkway that I especially like; it cuts alongside the bank of the large river that goes north and south. It’s situated in between two large bridges, one that seems to go in the direction of where the sun sets out west. Along the riverbank, you can hear the crashing of the waves against what sounds like thousands of tiny chimes. When you look closer at the sand and the beach you can see thousands of flat stones; green, brown, and translucent shards, all of them beach-glass softened by millions of pulses of the waves against the shoreline. The water runs over the glass, and when you catch it at the exact right moment it sounds like xylophones playing in unison. The sun falls through the sky in slow motion. The clouds and the bare sky nearest the horizon turn dark orange, yellow, while the sky higher up is already dark purple. The first planet shows through. And then maybe a rogue star, or two, but not many more than that. It’s the city after all. But for a moment I’m out there on the riverbank, alone, but I’m not actually alone. I’m a grain of sand or a pebble on the cosmic beach, along with everyone else. And we are all in it together. And I don’t need to feel anything else in the world. That’s enough. It will have to be enough.