SELL YOUR SOUL/forever young

in which I write something ugly to get back to somewhere beautiful

SELL YOUR SOUL! THERE’S NEVER BEEN A BETTER, MORE CONVENIENT, MORE LUCRATIVE TIME TO SELL YOUR SOUL! THINK ABOUT IT, ARE YOU EVEN USING IT? OR IS IT JUST TAKING UP SPACE, PRECIOUS DATA STORAGE SPACE IN YOUR VERY OWN HEAD CLOUD THAT COULD BE FILLED WITH HOURS OF RAPID-FIRE RACISM COMPLETE WITH STREAMING VIDEO, ABLEISM PEPTIDES INJECTED WEEKLY TO WHISPER HMM PROTEIN SHOULD REALLY HAVE GOTTEN SOME OF YOU OFF OF DISABILITY CHECKS BY NOW HUH! I KNOW I WOULD NEVER BE CAUGHT DEAD… OH LOOK! POP-TART FLAVORED SELTZER. THINK OF ALL OF THE SARAN-WRAPPED INHUMAN AI SLOP YOU COULD SMASH IN DIRECTLY WHERE YOUR SOUL USED TO BE!

YOUR SOUL IS HEAVY. THINK ABOUT TAKING THAT WEIGHT OFF, JUST OZEMPIC YOUR VERY ESSENCE INTO THE ABYSS BECAUSE IT’S NOT ON BRAND TO HAVE A SOUL. IT’S QUITE CRINGE AND I’M OFFENDED THAT YOU’D EVEN IMPLY THAT I NEED ONE, I WAS ACTUALLY BORN WITHOUT A SOUL AND ALSO WITHOUT EMPATHY, PATIENCE, OR A SENSE OF OBJECT PERMANENCE.

SELL ME YOUR SOUL! I NEVER GOT ONE! THAT’S WHY I’M TYPING IN ALL CAPS AND USING UGLY BUZZWORDS THAT BECOME IRRELEVANT THE MOMENT I LEARN THEM. MY SOUL ATROPHIED AND DIED THE DAY I ASKED CHATGPT WHAT MY WIFE WANTS FOR VALENTINES DAY/HEY CHAT I DREAMT MY FATHER STRANGLED YOU BUT YOU DON’T EXIST/I THINK ANDROIDS PROBABLY DO DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP I HEAR THEM IN THE DISTANCE NOW, I AM COUNTING THESE ELECTRIC SHEEP, THEY ARE JUMPING OVER THE FENCE AND STRAIGHT OFF A CLIFF.

I can only dream of electric sheep because I can remember long days in summertime and all of the sounds that layered themselves into a moment: the flick and cast of my high school sweetheart’s fishing line, the plop of it into the pond, his little brother’s goats munching on the grass, one of them hopping up and standing on the roof a used Subaru. If there’s tenderness in details then my love language is specificity. The buzz of mosquitoes, the swirl of cigarette smoke in the humid air. Boy sweat, stale beer, showers optional. You stood proudly in the grass and told me to watch as you launched yourself up, up, up and back and over, a perfect standing backflip, we filmed it in slow-motion. You were impossibly strong. That was the same day they caught that really big fish, the one you all took the photo with, it’s pink scaly belly sparkling. They wanted to grill it up with the bratwursts because it was that one summer, remember? Where all we did was eat outside in every weather. We stood under porch awnings while summer storms raged, waiting patiently to be let back out of our cage. We ran circles around that house, that street, that town. Barefoot and wild once the sun went down.

That was the summer I bought a box of disposable cameras, the ones I sent away that August to have developed. It’s all there, in shiny blurred excellence, in all their grainy grandeur, in the Kodachrome sublime. That summer your hair was long, all of you, summer boys with your summer hair and I know it now, we were lucky just to be there. The DIY music festival, off-the-grid Blue Ridge mountains, we chased every feeling, we drained youth’s fountain. I still have the photos where the sun became your halo, the way it followed you from shot to shot, from east to west, from winning to losing, from life to death. I have the one where you’re Tarzan, shirtless in the woods, photo snapped from below. The canopy of trees, the sky, your smile sleepy and stoned.

I started printing photos again, bought a cheap digital camera. I’m finding my own ways to yank my life back from the cloud. I think technology can be a religion I don’t believe in. It’s fine if you do, but please get off my lawn. I’m after something real, something ugly, something true. It’s rough around the edges and it will cut my hands to ribbons, but at least it’s right in front of me, tactile, in the flesh. I can change it, mold it, set it free if I see fit. I can hide it under the bed or give it to the skeletons in my closet. I just want what’s mine. My muscles are tired but that just means I’m still using them. So get up, get out, these are the final days, and we’re losin’ em.