Scroll, Click, Repeat
I’m already fifteen minutes late to my own writing session.
Which is impressive, because I work from home and my desk is eight feet from my bed. Also, the meeting is with myself. And I still manage to show up late. It’s like standing someone up on a date and then remembering, oh right, I am the someone.
The coffee is cold. The cursor on the screen blinks like it’s mocking me. Like it knows.
“Still blank, huh?”
Yes, yes it is. Thank you, blinking cursor. Thank you for your unwavering commitment to passive aggression.
I’ve opened the same document three times now—each time whispering, “Okay, this is the one,” like a man who’s just bought his sixth treadmill.
I do a lot of whispering when I write. Not for inspiration—just so I can say I’m technically talking to someone during the day.
The room smells like burnt toast. I have no idea where the toast is. I think it’s from last Tuesday. The overhead light has that buzzing fluorescent flicker that makes me feel like I’m being interrogated by my own ambitions. The chair creaks when I shift, which it does constantly, because I have the focus of a squirrel in a fireworks store.
Instead of writing, I scroll.
Swipe.
Like.
Scroll again.
It starts with a “just a quick check” of my notifications. This is the gateway drug. One little dopamine hit. Next thing I know, I’m watching a guy in Iowa build a hot tub out of packing peanuts and sheer optimism.
One heart becomes a thread. A thread becomes a comment war. I’m arguing with someone named “CryptoDawg69” about whether Hemingway would’ve used hashtags.
Spoiler alert: yes, but only ironically.
And then it hits me—I am a writer.
I remind myself of this like some people say the serenity prayer.
Grant me the courage to write, the strength to not Google myself, and the wisdom to close TikTok.
I flip back to the document. Still blank.
I type:
Once upon a—
Ping.
Group chat. Old college friends.
They’re debating for the hundredth time whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. It’s not even a debate anymore—it’s performance art. One guy made a PowerPoint. I mean, I respect the commitment. I also hate myself for not muting the thread three years ago.
I should ignore it.
I don’t.
I reply with a meme of Alan Rickman wearing a Santa hat.
That’s when The Voice kicks in.
Not a divine voice. Not Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones. My voice sounds like my mother if she majored in regret and minored in spite.
“You know, no one’s gonna read the story if you never actually write the story.”
Thanks, Mom-Voice.
And then another voice chimes in.
Not internal this time. It’s an email notification from my editor.
Subject: Deadline?
No text. Just a question mark.
A passive-aggressive punctuation mark wrapped in silence.
She had asked for a draft by this afternoon. “Just a rough version,” she said. “Sketches. A scene. Anything.”
The kind of “anything” that actually means “I’ve already pushed this with my boss and if you ghost me again, I will write you out of my contacts and possibly the literary world itself.”
I get up. March into the kitchen. Open the junk drawer and bury my phone beneath expired coupons, three half-dead batteries, and a stray AA that may or may not be fermenting.
I return to the screen like a soldier.
This is it. No distractions. Just me and the words.
The words, of course, are gone. I guess I never saved them. Or maybe they were never real. Maybe they were Schrödinger’s Sentence—both written and unwritten until observed.
Fine. Start fresh.
I picture a smell: hot pavement and old rain.
Then a sound—heels on concrete.
A woman: blazer over a band tee, messy hair, walking fast, clutching her purse like it’s got state secrets and breath mints.
I’m in.
Three paragraphs in and I forget about everything—the phone, the chat, the gnawing sense that I peaked at seventeen. I follow her down a dark hallway, and she glances over her shoulder like she’s being watched.
And not in the cute “meet-cute at Trader Joe’s” way. More like “this ends with duct tape and a Dateline episode.”
I am flying.
And then—
Buzz.
The phone.
Through the drawer. Through the kitchen. Through time and space.
Buzz. Buzz.
I freeze.
Ignore it.
Be strong.
Be Gatsby. Be Atticus. Be… anyone with a shred of willpower.
I type:
She reaches for the elevator button but hesitates—
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
My brain is melting. My fingers twitch. I am a man with the spine of a breadstick.
I run to the drawer like it’s on fire. I fish the phone out from beneath a tangle of rubber bands and what might be a broken Happy Meal toy.
The screen lights up:
“Your weekly screen time report is available.”
Six hours and twenty-seven minutes per day.
That’s almost a full-time job.
I should put it on my résumé.
Professional Avoider of Purpose
2016–present
I laugh. A little too hard. You know the kind—the “ha-ha-oh-God-I’m-dying-inside” kind of laugh.
But I don’t give in.
I swipe up.
I delete Instagram.
I put Twitter in a digital headlock and drag it to the trash.
Facebook? Gone.
TikTok? I banish it like a demon.
I sit back down.
Hands on keyboard.
And then—I write.
Not Shakespeare. Not yet. But a page.
Then another.
The woman in my story runs. She jumps a turnstile. She curses under her breath.
She gets away.
So do I.
I stop thinking about likes, views, and that weird comment someone left on my last post that just said “mid.”
(Mid? Buddy, I poured my soul into that post. I cried while writing it. And you gave it one syllable? That’s like responding to a wedding proposal with a shrug.)
I remember why I do this. Why I need to do this.
Because I’ve got something to say.
And no app in the world is gonna say it for me.
Not even the one that just auto-corrected “soul” to “soup.”
(Which—honestly? Still kind of works.)
Author’s Note:
This fun little story was created as a result of a smart ass comment I left on somebody’s Substack note thread which then left me inspired to write my own. here is the thread:
loved it