Platform wedges and jean skirts (short enough to make XXS underwear look like ankle-length gowns) streamline down the digital catwalk as slender figures twitch more than my iron deficient eyelids. There’s a good diversity here; a Naomi Campbell doppelganger is painted in lace and soaked in mock Swarovski, while some other nonhuman-looking person looks like a beast right out of Where the Wild Things Are.
Avatars that look like haute-couture supermodels from the 90s brutally stomp on the non-VIP ones, but the one common fishing line that twines them all together is that they’re indiscriminately rated 1 out of 5 stars.
Maybe a 2 if the creativity brands itself into my memory.
Dress to Impress, a runway model video game, is probably the most culturally iconic thing to grace Roblox since it crashed in 2020 (when millions of people wanted a free burrito from Chipotle).
I didn't fall victim to an empty google doc to talk about DTI, though. I want to swim into how it’s corroded my midnights, and peel apart the pomegranate of what it’s made me: chronically online.
The other day (1:01 AM), I was ravaging my retinas with hours worth of brain-rotting videos. One millisecond I was abducted into a world of digital fashion, the next I was dragged ankle-first into a compilation of questionable creatures from Atlanta, Georgia.
My limbs craved rest and were starved of sleep, but I continued my forty winks fasting. The fluorescent seduction of family guy clips pried my eyelids apart (so far apart, in fact, that closing them took more energy than brawling a retired MMA fighter), but there was literally nothing worth staying up for.
It was an assembly line of absolute dry dog food. Nothing funny, nothing insightful, and nothing creative.
That is, until I saw this jawbone shattering jab of a tweet.
“The bears are taking ozempic and becoming otters. the otters are getting laser and becoming twinks. the twinks are injecting E and becoming dolls. the dolls are getting their hair cut and becoming butches. And the butches, the butches are taking T and becoming bears”
For those who aren’t knee-deep in the porta-potty shitshow of social media, a bear is a “man with facial hair and a cuddly body”. You can probably infer what an otter is, and the twink-to-doll pipeline is basically the metamorphosis of teenage boy to 1990’s runway model.
I’ve met and loved a couple people who were halfway through that evolution. Some I still do–– they’re airplanes radiating light brighter than any star in the night’s backdrop. Others I mourn–– I pray on my grass-stained knees that they live, and not persevere.
But one of them (who’s name shall remain sealed behind sea salt and rust) still cries, begging the skies for femininity and for unconditional love.
“If I just got implants or got on ozempic…”
“If I l was a girl...”
“If I was skinnier… If I was tanner…”
“If… If… If…”
The rhetorics fly through the night’s heavy air, and cling to my sweat stained chest. The wishes go unheard, and no shooting stars shone in the vantablack void. Even the airplanes seem to be avoidant tonight.
The most lightless situation tonight was the silences broken by sniffs and sobs. We prophesied about our white picket dreams, and our countryside yearning. But for a young gay man, the only fences built would be the ones separating us from midlife jubilance.
And that truth, itself, makes this starless night seem brilliant and bright.
The desire for children, the backstabbing barb of them turning out like us, and the omnipresent numbness in the impossibility of it all hangs over our heads like a torn lace veil.
From looming fears of getting disowned, visions of voracious murders, and promises of romanticized adulthood, there’s no greater conflict than the war in our teenage minds.
But what can we do? Sink and prune our fingertips in pools of self-hatred? Tear up that canopy and delusionally dare, that “I’ll be the exception, all my dreams will come true”? A problem shared is a problem half solved, but is it any closer to being resolved if nobody around you truly cares to acknowledge that it’s EVEN THERE?
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