Maia

17

Snapchat Summer

I press my thumb to the screen,
hold down the half-eaten pie next to your name
and watch as you giggle-shriek
with shirtless boys and almost shirtless girls clutching red Solo cups and
carelessness. Your flat ironed hair falls into the frame, hides faces
you probably won’t remember when the time runs out
and these moments are deleted, forgotten
like they never happened.

Your summer hides in an app on your phone, and a million views
won’t make it real
enough, your picture frame memories will never be as real as folk songs
and sundresses, late night whispers about him and then and what-if.
Yours is a pictures-or-it-didn’t-happen kind of summer,
an is-that-even-candid type of summer, a temporary, public,
only-‘til-you-lift-your-thumb Snapchat summer.

Your summer is pixilated and fleeting.
When your phone runs out of memory,
will you, too?

Sometimes I wonder if sunsets existed before Instagram.
Maybe they just weren’t as pretty
without a filter, without followers, without
seventy-two likes to tell them
they were beautiful.