Into the Image Hole

Sick and delirious, I burned three days watching nine consecutive seasons of Little House on the Prairie with a hot water bottle on my face, mixing cough syrup with whipped cream in a mug and washing it down with warm beer. The productive use of a fever. A friend named Hannah took a more sensible approach to her sick days and built a Tumblr. She called it Things & Ponies, which is exactly what a Tumblr in 2011 gets called.

Seventy million American fourteen-year-olds in various states of despair had already colonized the platform by then. Hannah had tried Twitter and never clicked with it—Tumblr was quieter, more visual, less about opinion and more about the image dropped into the void. She started posting photographs: wolves in snow, girls floating mid-air, bare chests. The specific aesthetic of that moment—melancholy and beautiful and vaguely horny, never quite pinned down. Seventeen strangers would reblog something at 2 a.m. and that constituted connection.

I had my own at the time: a monument to self-regard that was, in retrospect, mostly photos of things I liked, including, frequently, myself. The image hole goes deep. Hannah’s was better. Hers had wolves.