Unplugging the Dead
I'd been walking through freshman year like a **zombie** for months, scrolling past everyone else's highlight reels while my own life felt like a blooper reel. My brain was fried from seven hours of screen time daily, my thumbs basically had their own pulse from all the scrolling, liking, replying—performing.
"Bro, did you see Jason's story?" Marcus asked at lunch, not looking up from his phone.
"Yeah. Epic," I lied. I hadn't seen it. I'd barely seen anything.
That Friday, something snapped. Maybe it was the seven unread DMs from my study group. Maybe it was my mom asking if I wanted to talk about my grades and me literally not having the mental energy to form sentences.
I grabbed the ethernet **cable** from my router and shoved it in my drawer. WiFi off. Data off. The great digital detox of tenth century—sorry, century.
By Saturday afternoon, I was vibrating. Not the good kind. The withdrawal kind. I ended up at Maya's house because she was the only person I knew who'd understand.
Her golden retriever, Buster, greeted me at the door like I'd been gone for years. That **dog** had more emotional intelligence than my entire friend group combined.
"You look like actual death," Maya said, tossing me a soda.
"I haven't had my phone for twenty-six hours."
"Wild." She didn't pick hers up either. That's why I liked her.
We sat on her roof watching the sunset—actually watching it, not recording it, not posting it, not captioning it with some fake-deep quote about living in the moment.
"You know what's messed up?" I said. "I forgot what my actual voice sounded like. The one in my head, not the one I use for posts."
Maya nodded. "We're all out here curating versions of ourselves that don't even exist. No wonder everyone's exhausted."
Buster nudged my hand, demanding attention. I scratched behind his ears and felt something real.
"Maybe I stay offline a little longer," I said.
"Yeah?" Maya smiled. "Look at you, breaking your addiction to the matrix."
"Shut up."
"Welcome back to the living, zombie."