Any Common Desolation

can be enough to make you look up at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few that survived the rains and frost, shot with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird would rip it like silk. You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive. The sound of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger. The ruby neon of the liquor store sign. Warm socks. You remember your mother, her precision a ceremony, as she gathered the white cotton, slipped it over your toes, drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard, the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves and, like a needle slipped into your vein— that sudden rush of the world.

Ellen Bass, 2016

In the picture she sends me, my friend Linda looks relaxed: eyes closed, head slightly tilted, an almost-smile on her lips, a fleecy white blanket around her neck. “My shoulders have been super tight, so I bought an electric heating pad for them,” she texts.

I study the photo, admiring (as I always do) the gorgeous cascade of silver strands highlighting her dark hair and smiling at the little tableau vivant she’s enacted in order to illustrate her bliss. Before I can respond, she reassures me that the heating pad has an automatic shutoff, so it won’t burn the house down.

I type, “Naturally anxious + extremely online = preemptively reassuring me that your heating pad is safe.”

“Haaaaa,” she replies. “TRUTH BOMB.”

This impulse to anticipate and defuse criticism is something I recognize in many of my friends who spend time in the trenches of social media discourse. There’s something about the internet— maybe it’s the relative anonymity, or that quick hit of dopamine you get when someone responds to you, I don’t know—that turns normal people into complete jerks. Post something about enjoying a meal kit, and a stranger pops up out of nowhere to comment, “That’s just salmonella by mail!” Make a joke about tourists in New Mexico and someone’s immediately in your mentions going, “Oh, so now I’m not allowed to wear JEWELRY without getting CANCELED???”

It’s exhausting.

For women and other people in marginalized groups, these kinds of interactions can get scary fast—I think every woman I know with even a modicum of public visibility has had some stranger