YOUTH NOW
Can a Thirst-Trap Selfie Lead to True Love?
As a young woman, I had polished myself into an object, a thing fit for consumption. Then that object caught a stranger’s eye.
I created my Instagram account in 2014, under a handle too pretentious to admit, back when I was 18, when both the platform and I were different beasts than we are today. Then, Instagram was formatted blockish and blue, the logo a straightforward camera on a lock screen. There were no stories. Images you uploaded were permanent, or as permanent as an image can be when you have the option of a dropdown menu, of thumbing delete.
And delete I have. Those early Instagram photos of myself (and they were always photos of me, heavily filtered, effortfully sloe-eyed) have been gradually and subtly pared away. But certain images, about 200 of them at a recent count, I’ve left behind: There’s a shot of me done up in an odd combination of shorts and thrift-store heels, smiling beside a movie poster at a strip-mall theater. Around that time there’s also an image of me in a crop top with my hands running through my hair, liberated and sexy, notwithstanding the fact that I was in a parking lot with a public trash can in the frame. There’s another of me looking over my bare shoulder; the one of me on my knees…
