She flutters through cyberspace like a ponderous, punctured zeppelin. A couple likes here, some right-swiping there, her trunk trawls the surface of communities in passing. But she never plunges in to join the interactive, GIF-sharing multitudes. Despite their herd backgrounds, elephants never connect. Not like this anyway, she muses. Hashtags and hand-waves, she gets no closer.
Then, her interactions begin to evolve. First, her self-deprecating humor gets retweeted around. She concocts another joke. Next, a glamor shot taken in a moment of weakness starts a Fenty frenzy. She makes a fish face and poses again. A snarky rejoinder reaches other new followers. And with a pool-emptying splash, she jumps into social waters. Pachyderms are pleasers, at their core.
Soon, however, trawling ceases to satisfy her. Without instant approval, she grows bored. Dependency’s undertow begins to twist her, while each platform exaggerates her persona in a different direction. The big picture warps, her aspect ratio unlocked. Like the blind men and the elephant, her separate audiences see only her thick skin, that coy trunk, or her incisive tusks.
In the end, only disjointed parts remain, like poachers’ trophies torn from the savanna. And she wonders how to become just an elephant again.
And don’t miss David Hanlon’s wonderful poem Facing the other way.