Things the Internet has Ruined (Hope)

Image of artwork “Hope” by Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815) After Johann Heinrich Ramberg (1763 – 1840), courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

Before the Internet, people just died

and maybe you didn’t know they had died

because the last you heard they had moved somewhere

like Fort Myers or Punta Gorda

and they passed out of your life with ease,

so that sometimes you might pause

to think of something that they had said or did

which would cause you to smile

and then you would wonder what happened to them,

so that you would think that they were sitting on a beach somewhere

sipping a cocktail and watching waves

while you were stuck in Belle Fourche still working the same job

you’ve been working for twenty years,

and you might have felt some envy, but mostly, you were comforted

with the thought that someday you would also be on a beach somewhere

sipping a margarita and watching the waves.

Now, when you have the memory of a person,

you wonder whatever happened to them,

and where did they move to,

so, you search their name on your stupid phone or your laptop

and you find out that they are not sipping a Rum and Coke in Pensacola

but that they are dead

and have been dead for years.

The unknowing of a death is gone:

accessibility

has destroyed tranquility.

Which is what happened when I searched for my old secretary,

who had moved to Florida before the Millennium,

and saw that she had died seven years ago,

and all this time I had not thought of her often,

except to share the joke we had played on her stalker cop-ex-boyfriend

or to think of her chipmunk happiness, her adorable face,

her independence:

the reinvention of herself after forty, after divorce.

This time has passed, not seeming like years at all,

unless a year becomes a day or an hour at this age,

and all the while I have thought she was wearing a sarong,

shopping at Coldwater Creek, listening to Jimmy Buffett songs,

with a man of some wealth and more years, or no wealth and less years,

laughing alongside her,

and I wonder what she died from, and I hope she did not suffer,

but mostly, I want to hold her in the present,

the ocean-side, now-should-be-sixty-ish-imp,

that this awful screen has stolen from me.

Things the Internet has Ruined (Hope) first appeared in Oakwood, Vol. 4, Issue 9 (2019).

The poem subsequently appeared in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Winter 2021 Edition.

Things the Internet has Ruined (Hope) Copyright © 2019 by Donna Kathryn Kelly