i never knew how much the world would whiplash

-chora chorion

i never knew how much the world would whiplash 

into virtual vertigo, the thin membraneous fontanelle of 

my childhood on the internet rolling and rolling and 

rolling, all hardboiled eggy rubber, into a nineties computer 

mouse forever: cord-connected, ubiquitous, umbilical.

i never knew that time was not quantifiable, nor that time 

was never frozen within itself to begin with: eternal,

a slippery snapshot of binary code, programmed  

effervescence. i never knew how quickly entire worlds 

could wither into archived obsolescence. 

when i was seven i clicked into existence my first digital 

landscape: a where’s-waldo of lisa frank, american girl, and 

candyland. lollipops and kittens and psychedelic neon rainbows 

melting pink onto choppy blocky dinosaurs. each pixel 

a person, each square a world, i hunted fowl on the oregon trail.

if you smeared tears or dewdrops onto the cold convex glass 

screens of school computers you could make oil sheen 

rainbows, smudging technicolor RGB displays, squeegeeing 

shimmering glittery fascination out of a buzz of drab colors 

and dark makeup and angry music and Y2K doomsday prophecies.  

between the ramona quimbies and dear-god-it’s-me-margarets 

and miss mary mack all dressed in black on the tarmac 

during recess someone said you could stare into the mirror and 

recite bloody mary, ten times, or twelve, and something terrifying 

would happen. so i never faced myself in mirrors at night. i believed then

in the magic of words, the power of the utterance, the strength 

of the spoken or written syllable, the undying value of meaning. i believed

if i said abracadabra or open sesame, yahoo answers and google search  

would tell it like it was. on aim and msn and myspace and tumblr

we bared our souls in acronyms and shorthand and fun. i believed 

that truth lies in virtue like a gold standard, a token 

of trust, the heft of real. i never knew that this could be broken. i never 

imagined that words could be reduced to shattered shards 

of noisy code, dots on the horizon of an empty flood:

here becoming nowhere, everywhere, nothing.

i never knew that being human would never be the same. yesterday 

i read on a digital device that humans may someday live to be 

three hundred years old, but did you know that a million people 

died in the world today? did you know that the internet 

is actually a nervous system of deep sea cables, physical kraken 

of lovecraftian proportions, awakening to itself?