Scrolling

I lost an edge. Somewhere, in between the monitor-lit nights of scrolling. Somewhere there we lost that tone of adventure, that heaviness of Technicolor painted across swathes of sky too vast to be contained.

We oo and ah at the latest advances in screen technology.

HD sharp enough to cut your retina they say.

Your life won’t be complete without 60” of wall covered by our screen…no 70”…why not make it 105? And we are impressed.

And we cheer. And we roll out in the millions to place 60” windows on our inner walls, noting the grass stains and stitching on the butts of tightly clad balls of muscle called football players.

Windows to worlds we label reality, hoping, hoping that this larger-than-life-sized scripted reality would shine its light deep into our living rooms, bathing the couch in dreams we thought real. Dreamed real. Desperately pleaded to be real.

Has the irony not yet dropped? Is it still falling like the way the glass in the screen is falling, its viscosity unnoticed and unperceived until our eyeballs have fused with eyelids and we’re lying in our Sunday best below the sweet grass, grass in RD—Real Definition—that unabashed yet unproclaiming earth?

Does the sky not stretch beyond five-feet? Can we capture it in a room?

Does your child not sparkle with ten-trillion pixels in every smile? Can we capture it in a lipstick commercial?

Does the air not move past your skin in euphoric unbridled chaos? Can we capture it in a box fan?

Where does interruption end and production begin? Where do light flickering shadows leave their mark? Where can my fingers be worn by the reigns of a coaxed beast and not by the scrolling of a little rubber wheel, promising me the world?