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Choices are like needles in my brain.

I wander among piles of books, thick with dust. Sampling random excerpts in a kind of languid frenzy. Wondering what it would mean to read them all. What it would mean to establish order where order has never existed.

If I could go back to that, I would. It is so much worse now.

I gaze out at a glittering plain that sprawls off into forever. It is more like a void, because you can lose yourself to it. There are digital choices beyond number, supplementing their concrete counterparts. And eclipsing them. We have painted horizons upon our horizons.

This shadow realm pulses alongside our own. It vibrates with the siren song of the trillion things I could be doing, reading, playing, watching. It beckons, with succulent treats in its outstretched hands. Like a drug dealer who trolls every street corner, catcalling in the selfsame voice.

So I cultivate a sort of Luddism. It is a defense mechanism to escape the choices, the distractions--and the connections, most of all. To defer that void that would open up and swallow all the minutes of my life.

These minutes are fleeting. I save them only to my flesh drive.

It is 2006. A heat wave descends on North America. It grips New York City in its humid fist. Manhattan is a pedestrian’s feast, but its intrigues demand the company of music. I have refused to purchase an mp3 player. Instead I stuff my portable cd player in my pocket.

Its mechanics are wholly unsuited to the human gait. It skips with every step. I jam my hand into my already bulging pocket and pinch the cd player, applying enough pressure that it stays on track. I maintain this awkward effort everywhere I go.

The songs are the same 12 tracks on an infinite loop, though this only seems a hardship in retrospect.

If I indulge that lens, the lens of retrospect, the scene bends and distorts. I look cartoonish, a walking anachronism. And yet, I feel a nostalgia too. Because I am a different sort of refugee. Not from climate, but from time. From its endless march. Its tyranny.

It is 2009. Choosing takes time. I point to an RCA mp3 player inside the glass case, nestled in its own spot among its superior kin. The Walmart electronics employee unlocks it and hands it to me. I pay thirty dollars. This is the most begrudging concession I can make. Time wins.

It is 2005. We buy an answering machine for our dorm room. I only receive one message.

It is the apex of winter. The cold is biting, and it bites harder with my prolonged exposure. I was invited to a party, but I can’t find the apartment.

I duck into a convenience store. I fill a Styrofoam cup with machine cappuccino and resume my search. With each step, the syrupy liquid bounces out of the lid’s half-open lip. The drink goes cold and so do I. Defeated, I retreat to my dorm room.

The tiny red dot on the answering machine, usually dormant, is alive and blinking. I press a button and the drunken voice of the host pours out of the little speaker. He thinks I am no-showing. The sounds of revelry drown his words, but I hear the disappointment. I call back, but by the time I find the party it is all but dead.

We need better connections.

It is 2006. I sit at a bustling dinner banquet, sweating in the only suit I own. It is a gathering related to some student function. Everything seems artificial. The people. The clothing. The lights. It is a false ritual for an insular world.

The conversation turns to cell phones, and that heady feeling wells over me. I flush in my polyester. It is a nice warmth, the quiet rapture of self-absorption.

“I just don’t like the feeling of people knowing where I am all the time,” I say. I’m not talking about Apple or Google or the NSA tracking my every move. “Warrantless wiretapping” is the outrage of the hour and no one knows it is only the hint of a prelude.

I am scared of availability. That anyone could call me at any time and expect an answer.

It is 2013. My grandma creates a Facebook profile. It has no picture and I am her only friend. I suspect she created it just to reach me. She long ago gave up trying to call. I do not ignore her wall posts, but I give her only the most cursory, canned responses.

She hints that I should call in every message. I don’t respond to that part. Instead I opt for a “Hope you’re doing well!” My grandpa is dead and she has breast cancer. She is not doing well.

But I don’t have to acknowledge any of that. That woe and decay. I maintain my distance, even as I feign availability. My Facebook page is not a responsive organism. It is a static sign post, falsely advertising my participation in a world from which I have long since withdrawn.

It is 2007. I buy a Virgin Mobile “go phone.” This is not a concession. Not yet. It is for “emergency purposes” and I use it only thus.

I am in the laundromat, scrounging together a wardrobe for a weekend getaway. Someone is trying to reach me, but it is not an emergency. And she doesn’t call.

Blocky letters materialize on the tiny slate gray screen. The message is crude in its unexpectedness. In its presumption that I respond. This is the first text of my life, and I did not know my phone was capable of it. I forget the words and my response, if I responded. But I remember the feeling of violation.

It is 2013. My submission is sudden. I have not seen my parents in two years. On my way to pick them up at the airport I stop at a coffee shop. I order a latte and while waiting for it to brew I use the bathroom, then I leave.

When I arrive at the airport I make to call them and I cannot find my Verizon go phone. I pad the outside of my pants as if I can will it there by magic. My mind ignites in a muted panic. It is the silent, visceral alarm of a world disrupted. It is a tiny funeral.

I lost it at the coffee shop, but when I return it is already gone. When I arrive at the Verizon store I learn it is now cheaper to buy a smartphone. This time I greet the change not with resistance, but with relief.

I have toyed with my girlfriend’s iPhone. Marveled at the sleekness, the user-friendliness of the machine. I am ready. I join the ranks of the truly connected world.

On. All. The. Time.

It doesn’t happen at once. Addiction never does. The first sip is innocuous. It’s only in retrospect—that pink-prismed lens again—that I glimpse the enemy in the rushes.

That’s how I remember my first flirtation with the iPhone. Analogous to my first glass of merlot. Smooth. Inviting. Here to stay.

The first full bout of intoxication hits when I board the train to work. I realize, with a lucid high, that I am freed from my portable radio’s terrestrial limits. I can listen to anything. This is a touch of godhood on my commute. It is the shedding of a desiccated skin.

I am as new. And I am hooked. Was there ever a world without this?

It is 2014. I don’t know if this is power or servitude. It is all muddled now. I am lost to the screens. They begin and end my day.

The web browser on my phone is open to ten pages. I am subscribed to dozens of podcasts. I have signed up for numerous online classes. To my brain, Wikipedia is crack and sugar and chocolate and sex in one fine bundle. The accumulated minutiae is like moss on my cerebellum.

I open hundreds of tabs in Firefox and Chrome. I email myself links. I save them to separate apps and store this digital detritus among a growing host of cyber nooks and crannies. There are vaults brimming with data in nether quarters I dare not unlock.

I create an email account to replace the email account that replaced the email account given over to spam. I police my primary account with the rigidity of an ascetic, culling the inessential and pretending this is not a subjective task. Sometimes I give up and stop checking it. Other times I check it as incessantly as a gerbil sucking the sterling teat in its cage.

I have apps that sync to the digital inventory of public libraries. With these I have built the library of the cosmos for free. I lose days to the mere contemplation of what I might read. I check out dozens of books at once, and my “history” tab looks like the reading list of an insane person.

I do not own a television, yet I watch more television than at any point in my life. I binge watch current hits and the acclaimed of old alike. I watch and re-watch movies I would not touch if they were not already at my fingertips. I feel dull and tired and sad.

I lose myself to the rabbit hole of comments sections and forums. I join the collective and never-ending analysis of books I have already read, instead of rereading the books themselves or reading new books. Or doing new things. It is a sea of chatter that will never end. It will expand and expand until it goes bust, like the universe itself.

I have courted an adversary that is beyond me. I need an intervention.

It is 2015. I will myself to small acts of techno-exile. I turn my phone off occasionally. I limit my browsing, aware it will begin innocently, but unravel from there.

I quit keeping up with the cavalcade of content. I read books. Actual books. I savor their musty odor. I spill coffee on their sepia pages and fixate on the permanence of the mottled brown stains. I can see the physical spaces where they begin and end. I place bookmarks in their worn folds and I can see my progress.

It always comes down to control. With technology, and with everything else.

I have a hungry brain. It cannot differentiate the digital approximation of the thing from the thing itself. And within that disparity lies the essential. The beating pulse of actual life.

I am like an overeager child at a buffet. Returning to his parents’ table with a heaping plate of food he can never eat. It is a waste. And when I accumulate the sequence of that waste, and day after day it spirals like DNA—I begin to see the dimension of the tragedy. Of time lost to the backlit abyss.

So I press and hold the off button on my iPhone. After an elongated wait the screen goes dark. Even then, there is a warning—a lifeline to the infinite. Slide to power off. As if to say, surely you didn’t mean this.

I slide it, and the screen lapses to full black. When I peer into its midnight surface I see only my reflection.