In an act of pure surrender, Mia Pappas just shift-selected every screenshot on her cluttered desktop and dragged them all directly to the trash without so much as a backward glance.
“My screenshot situation was becoming untenable,” Mia explains. “Memes, weird ads, celebrity haircut inspos, hundreds of small lines of text, the source of which I could not begin to tell you.”
“I had created a whole cosmos in my desktop, yet I found myself not enriched by the fruits of my labor, not lifted up, but rather buried alive,” Mia adds. “That’s when I realized I only had one shot at freedom: burning it all to the fucking ground.”
While Mia briefly considered chucking her laptop from her fourth story window, she landed on a less expensive but equally liberating alternative by dragging the images into the little finder trash bin. Still, some are unable to comprehend her grave actions.
“She just junked them all? Without even looking?” says Mia’s roommate, Dante Walker. “My, God. Surely, she took all of those screenshots for a reason? Couldn’t she parse through them? Doing some organizing, make some folders? I feel like I don’t even know this person I share a bathroom with.”
But the choices of the radically liberated are seldom understood by those still walking the beaten path.
“I am bound to no screenshot now,” Mia says. “Were there some things in there I might have enjoyed looking at one day? Some moving text exchanges with my late grandmother? A truly perfect screenshot of my best friend sneezing on FaceTime? Sure. But I’ll make new memories, if the universe wills it so.”
“To connect with the unseen forces of our Creator’s love and the bonds of humanity, one must annihilate the self,” Mia adds. “So, yeah, that’s basically what I did. Plus, it’s just so much faster than going through everything; like, there were layers of screenshots.”
In the absence of true understanding, Mia’s subversive act of destruction has at least produced newfound respect from those closest to her.
“I was going to ask Mia to go through our coat closet today,” Dante says. “But now I think I’d better not. Honestly, I’m scared if I did, she would just set fire to our whole apartment building.”
Let the flames of violent rebirth descend!
