[Hito, I’m thinking of the disintegrating emoji again]
it’s [a two second clip] [a poor image] [a still of a crying emoji] [pure anguish]
Their parabolic mouth is so agape it exceeds the face, stretching Simpsons™ skin past the rounded chin with eyes squeezed shut below disembodied hands grasping for heaven [like
Laocoön but actually fucking screaming] [and they are screaming] [for two seconds] [as they crumble into dust] [and that dust
lifted] [gone quicker than it came]
[and I am stuck on this scream, Hito] [it haunts my scroll] [lurking always beneath my right thumb] [sometimes I seek it out]
for example [I put on
your video] [and in another tab] [put on
a video of 1 hour of silence] [punctuated indiscriminately by the screaming disintegrating emoji] [I flicked back to yours]
and listened, knowing [it felt safer]
[but they have another life, Hito]
In amongst the endless iterations, there are
the silent ones
[it bothers me] that lost scream [because that felt real] [wasn’t it] [
someone’s scream]
that then [became image]
then [language] [‘screaming disintegrating emoji’] [‘disintegrating emoji gif’]
On Twitter [X]
people just signal it like that.
I want to tell you what it means but I’m not sure I even know, Hito. I think it may be a kind of speechlessness, the kind that calls you offscreen. I think you follow the scream elsewhere.
Matthew Whiteman writes poems about the things he cannot explain in essays. He studied Art History and English Literature in Te Whanganui-a-tara, and lives there too, but knows his hometown, Kirikiriroa, has the better garden.