300 Days of Writing
Day 16: Social Media
It all started with a click.
Her screen went black. She cursed at it, clicking repeatedly, first with vigor and then with a ferocious intensity. She didn’t want her mother’s computer to die from a stupid virus or to get hacked all because she had succumbed to her friend’s pressure to join the ground.
the ground was the latest social media trend and it had swept through the nation with surprising speed, eradicating its predecessors: Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. They all fell into oblivion as the nation joined the ground.
Sammy had been apprehensive about it. She liked her Instagram account, it was where she stored the pictures of her cat, Fly, or pictures of her dad when he came to visit.
But that morning, she had tapped the Instagram app on her phone to nothing. Her phone screen just froze and when she restarted it and tried again, the same course of action ensued. Tap the app, frozen screen, force restart, repeat. By the time she got to school, she’d heard the news.
It was all gone. Everything except the ground.
“Why?” she asked her friends walking to first period. “I don’t get why everyone likes it so much more.”
Her friends were glued to their phones, scrolling through the ground. “I still don’t understand why you haven’t gotten it already.”
“Well, I guess I will… now there’s nothing else.”
And she did. It was the first thing she did when she got home. She liked to create accounts on computers, her pudgy thumbs were terrible at typing on her phone, it was another reason she had loved Instagram, only pictures and double-tapping, and she usually sent her friends voice messages via WhatsApp just to avoid texting.
So she had taken her mother’s laptop, and after creeping on her mother’s dating profile, rolling her eyes at her mother’s sorry attempts at flirting, had typed into Google
the ground
She found it instantly, and creating the account was easy. It didn’t ask for her birthdate or anything, just an email address and password and then create.
*
Sammy hit the still black screen. “For fuck’s sake turn on!”
And it did. Her eyes dilated as she focused in on it.
She never looked away.
Сайхан Бичээрэй!
H