My first year of college, between semesters, at the long relieved end of the year, I went to visit a friend who was studying at Oxford. It was a warmer damper greener winter there, after an unforgiving December in New York, and all the buildings were small and quiet. I’d just barely lived in New York long enough to notice the quiet elsewhere. Everything in this small British town was blanketed in a quiet wet green, old stone and moss. We went down to the computer lab, walking through the hush of a nearly cleared-out campus, the sparkle and softening at the end of the year. We gathered around a hulking desktop computer and my friend showed me how to make a Facebook. I’d heard whispers about this new thing, and ignored them. Rumors stayed rumors longer then. It took more time to figure out what was real and what was changing, to shift from one expectation to the next. The world felt at the time less permeable, more resistant, more fixed and yet less known. But maybe I was just very young, and very little had happened to me yet. I barely even had a picture of myself to put up on the page I made. We had not yet started hoarding the evidence of our own faces.
hoarders
hoarders
hoarders
My first year of college, between semesters, at the long relieved end of the year, I went to visit a friend who was studying at Oxford. It was a warmer damper greener winter there, after an unforgiving December in New York, and all the buildings were small and quiet. I’d just barely lived in New York long enough to notice the quiet elsewhere. Everything in this small British town was blanketed in a quiet wet green, old stone and moss. We went down to the computer lab, walking through the hush of a nearly cleared-out campus, the sparkle and softening at the end of the year. We gathered around a hulking desktop computer and my friend showed me how to make a Facebook. I’d heard whispers about this new thing, and ignored them. Rumors stayed rumors longer then. It took more time to figure out what was real and what was changing, to shift from one expectation to the next. The world felt at the time less permeable, more resistant, more fixed and yet less known. But maybe I was just very young, and very little had happened to me yet. I barely even had a picture of myself to put up on the page I made. We had not yet started hoarding the evidence of our own faces.