A Little Bird Once Told Me…
            
            It was summer.  Clouds floated along, as dainty as a lamb in a meadow.  Winds fluttered by, their laughter rippling across the sky.  Sunlight beamed across like strobe lights.  The scroll wheel was almost broken on the mouse and clicking echoed in my brain.  My back was so bent over that the Hunchback of Notre Dame would laugh at me.  And I still continued to gaze at the computer.  It was the typical routine of a 13-year old: infinite scrolling on Facebook.  Photo after photo.  Text after text.  Post after post.  I felt enlivened by other people’s moments, their experiences, their memories.  A cute puppy here, a beautiful beach next, someone surfing a gargantuan wave.  I craved more.  My finger, already fused into a ragged hook, kept slicing down for stories to read, accomplishments to marvel at, pictures to admire.  And then something happened.  
            My eyes, tortured by infinite words, started to close.  My head slumped backwards, to the point where I looked tranquilized.  It was just a simple nap…but it wasn’t.   
            I found myself in a field.  Twitter birds flew by, chirping over and over the phrase, “Social media, social media, social media.”  Vines snaked around trees, with grapes that proudly displayed the face of laughing cats.  The sun was an iPhone that kept on snapping photos.  Wherever I stumbled, f-shaped insects would buzz angrily like a dentist’s drill revving up.  Little chat boxes hopped along on chunky stumps while arrows did somersaults and flips in midair.  Clocks were everywhere.  Realistic clocks, cuckoo clocks, exploding clocks, melting clocks, all with the uniform ticking and toking.   It was as if I entered Salvador Dali’s imagination and found Lewis Carroll’s creations lounging around.    
 
             “Where…where am I?”  
 
            Only the wind cackled in response.  That was the answer I needed.  I tried to run, but instead I tripped along like a buffoon.  Only when I tripped on a root and pitched forward did I realize how serious my situation was becoming. 
            The sun morphed into a frowny face.  A storm cloud was brewing. As the cold, dark sky swallowed me up, the moon flashed into existence, as pale as a bleached skeleton.  A silhouette of a bell formed in the moon’s largest crater and kept on ringing.   Stars popped like firecrackers, each becoming a string of numbers that increased by the second. 1 hundred.  1 thousand.  1 million.  1 billion.    
            Grey mist choked the air and bugs plastered themselves into shiny blue smears on the trees.  In the distance I heard thunder, or rather, the tune of Old Town Road.  Letters started falling in time to the electrical music that screeched in my ears.  Ugly black frames that drove pits in the ground and forced me to duck.  
            A streak of pasty yellow Pikachu lightning flashed and the storm broke.  Rain poured down as 0’s and 1’s and slammed me into the ground.  The trees reached down gnarled thumbs and trapped me as I tried to stumble away.  140 characters dropped out of the heavens and blanketed me in a maelstrom of speech bubbles.  Infinity Gauntlets shuddered out of the ground and clenched my legs. 
            But nothing would have prepared me for the shiny, black monolith that erupted out of the tangle of roots.  My eyes fell on a pristine apple emblazoned on the front of the phone, before five lines of text flashed, black as a swarm of bats. 
            Here Lies The One
            Who Died Of Social Media
            May He Always Rest In Peace Here For Eternity.
            “Do The Right Thing.”
            ~Google
 
             Then the dirt started pulling me down, into a blur of pixels and bytes.  As I started to sink, I caught sight of a little blue bird hovering high above.      
 
            “No…ack… I will never…agk… die of social media… urk…this won’t happen…”
 
            That was when I woke up.  I could swim in my own sweat, and my skin was crawling with imaginary caterpillars.  The sound of a little blue bird singing alerted me to a presence at the window.  I was riveted by its beady black eyes that were staring at me.  Then the bird raised one wing in the direction of my computer.  A simple caw came out of its beak and it flew off, leaving me to ponder my future.
            I turned towards the posts that were my life, my fingers once again clicking on funny dog videos.  Then my fate in the dream flashed back to me.  I stopped chuckling and clicked on something else.  As Facebook vanished with a silent scream, I got up and gazed at the landscape around me that I had abandoned.  Too much of the world I had willingly given up on in pursuit of a pixilated fantasy world.  There were so many things to do, I reflected, closing the door behind me and walking towards a beautiful sunset.