Read Messages
Emptiness leaves me at a loss. This feeling retreats when my attention shifts, but can twist back into my thinking with sudden force, making a grand entrance and blasting out everything else. In that moment something like poetry forms; attention scatters suddenly, explodes, keeps bouncing through a turbulent mind. Silence still lingers between the four walls, but peace has been lost within the compression of the space and emotions that silence creates. This is a particular kind of moment: the helplessness of facing the world’s rapid flux while being unable to grasp or even fully know oneself takes over the mind, and a surge of negative emotion hits. In this moment, silence works by way of the storm it implies, not necessarily a physical one, and the extreme suppression it carries.
This is how I feel facing a social network where nothing new is being generated. I can feel the vitality and the sounds draining away, everything receding from me, gradually returning to that primal state in which I am completely isolated and nothing has anything to do with me. It makes every effort I’ve made toward anything instantly meaningless, because my life itself detaches from my body; my thinking, my writing, my moods, my everything becomes a stone adrift in the vague cosmos, containing no organic life. It has lost its exchange with all things, lost every quality of being a subject.
This is a process of loss; the colorful avatars in the list all turn gray and dim within it, become in that instant devoid of function or soul, reduced to items displayed in a shop window, to keepsakes that hold memories. Yet what I am always collecting is myself; I can only keep leafing back through what I once was. I loop endlessly within the unease of an incomplete collection and the anxiety of death, yet I myself exist beyond death, in a kind of nihilistic phrasing.
In the moment I open WeChat and find no one has sent me anything, my meaning and my life collapse together.
Unread Messages
The garish red dot, like the marks on a graded test. The UI designer, with clever methods, has both tormented and tricked me, compelling me to clear that unpleasant red dot as quickly as possible. It is a rose on a barren planet, a drop of blood on white paper; it arouses in me a fierce curiosity and forces me to personally extinguish every unread message.
Why design unread messages to be so provocative? A splash of vivid red in a green-toned messaging app will invariably arrest the eye, letting anxiety surge out of it. The design is undeniably successful; I can never ignore it. I know it represents a precious opportunity for interaction, a hard-won opportunity, someone else’s probe and gaze directed at me, a letter of challenge issued to me. I cannot ignore unread messages, just as I cannot ignore the gazes around me, the appraising looks, the invitations.
I cannot bear a flood of unread messages, just as I cannot feel at ease in a crowd. What brings me peace is the successful suspension of exchange; once exchange is set in motion, I am inevitably swept in and cannot break free. I consider the other person symbolically more than I consider myself, clearing unread messages as a way of displaying my courtesy and respect.
But I love those rare, star-like unread messages. They mark out the crowd and the nebulae, mark the invisible orbital connection between me and the crowd, mark my place in the vast cosmos and the proof of my existence.
May the unread always shine; that is a spotlight aimed at me alone, a waltz played to cover over the silence of my nights in the wreckage of my leisure.