I decided that tossing and turning in my bed wouldn’t make the world spin backwards. I twisted around in my midnight dark room. I stared at my ceiling, then at my wall, then at my other wall, then out my window. My yard stretched darkened before me, apple trees and a lawn that needed cutting. The lake lay silent and across the unpainted street, intermittent lights reflected from the mirror-like surface. The sights of my town, village really, didn’t fill my heart with its usual warm comfort. In fact, white hot tears formed at the edges of my eyelids, and so I turned around and stared at the blackness of my pillow, letting it soak up my woes.

With the weight of the world, I thought my head would implode. But rather the pressure in my temples suggested it would explode from within the spastic confines. I breathed deep, shuddering like a child in wake of a nightmare. It was less than two weeks that I would be leaving my hometown for college, and every night was like this now.

With an angry huff I sat up in bed. A small breeze from my window hit the cold sweat on my skin and made me shudder, so I pulled my blanket around me. I rose out of bed, walking so as to keep the floor from creaking, and flipped on the light. I blinked away the spots that came from the sudden brightness, and walked to the corner of my room, where my Memory Box sat.

With the departure from childhood approaching at a lightning pace, I’d started to give in and distract myself with things like this. It was something I hated to do. I liked to deal with troubles the old fashioned way. A long walk on a rainy sidewalk. A day out fishing. Telling myself, with clenched fists and gritted teeth, to get over it. But this was different- not an illness, a disease. I was an 18 year old toddler being told to leave everything I’ve ever known and loved behind.

I sifted through the materials, trying to fill my buzzing mind with memories instead of misgivings. I found my first fishing knot, a clumsy thing I tied in practice with my dad around a metal ring one sunny morning before our first fishing trip. I thumbed through a pile of dusty academic awards with torn up backing from peeling them off their taped positions on my bedroom wall. There were notes from my childhood sweetheart, from days ago to a decade ago. Glow sticks from school dances scattered the box, snuffed of their light. I put aside folded copies of my farewell graduation speech that sat on top of the clutter. Sitting aside from the rest was the crown. Homecoming King, like my brother before me. It was my pride and joy, like a drug it shot happiness through my nervous system and always brought about a smile with just a glance at it. I brushed the dust from the felt as I the memories flood in.

I wasn’t the typical concoction for a high school king of anything. I was an average athlete and scholar and had a few close friends. I think I earned the honor because I loved everybody and everything about my school and home. I killed myself on the football field and the track and in classes, all in the name of being a Florence Bobcat. I did my best to make people smile and laugh, and I wouldn’t have traded it for the anything. I supposed the crown was a testament to that, but so was the mind crushing homesickness that cut through my head like swords through monsters. I sat the crown on top of the box, and although it hurt like torn muscles, I smiled a weak smile. I had fallen a long way, from being crowned in front of my family and friends to a cheering crowd, to sitting with puffy eyes on the edge of my bed, shaking, wrapped in a blanket. It almost made me laugh.

I pushed the box back into the corner, my ironic smile fading. I turned the lamp off, and by the tentative wisp of moonlight illuminating the place, gleaming off of the packed boxes in the corner, the sparse patches of my desk surface where the wood stain hadn’t been scratched away, I lied back down. Emotion boiled through my guts, so I sought another distraction. I grabbed my iPad Mini, a prize from the school after graduation.

I swiped left and right on the screen, doing nothing, squinting against the light. I suppose my mind calmed down, but I knew a mere whisper of doubt would bring the savage animals inside my skull again. I poked at the buttons on my screen, page after page of entertaining nothings popped up and were swiped away. Somewhere in the midst of these pages though, I found something I hadn’t explored yet. A blue box with a bold white “T.” I hit the button.

The world was obliterated before me. My darkened room unfolded like a letter in a prism of color and in an instant I was falling forever through the air as a blinding light blew up my retinas.

I landed on a giant pillow, feathers exploded around me. After blinking the spots in my vision away, I saw I was in the middle of a metropolis. Buildings stood all around me, tall and steely and reaching for the sky at neck-craning heights. People buzzed about, cellphones pressed to their ears by their shoulders as they carried suitcases or wrote things on notepads so fast their hands blurred.

“Hello there,” said a voice. I wheeled around, and there stood a well-dressed man. Crisp white dress shirt with sleeves rolled to his elbows, sleek shoes and khakis, he had a lean to the way he stood that suggested comfort and confidence. He extended his hand, which I shook after clambering off of the pillow.

“Where am I?” I asked, looking around. Cars zipped between the buildings and through the pristine streets. A natural yet weak light poked through the immense buildings onto the streets, giving the place a pale glow.

“Wherever you wish to be,” said the man. I raised my eyebrows, and with a smile he beckoned me to follow him.

“Whatever you want, we have it,” the man said. He pointed to a building as we walked by. Full-sized glass windows lent me a view inside. Dinosaur bones sat on display, charts were tacked to walls, men in lab coats poured over notes and peered at vials. I was somewhat interested in science, and the sight of dinosaur bones had me pushing my nose against the glass, but as far as I was concerned it was a coincidence that the building was there. I think my doubt showed on my face, as the man smiled and urged me to continue following him.

He pointed out another building to me after a short walk, and again I peered inside the large windows. In this one, television screens were scattered throughout the room, and people sat in deep-seated chairs. I peered closer, and saw it wasn’t television programs, but video games that played on the screens. I pulled away from the window, dubiety fading, but not enough to satisfy my guide, who urged me further on.

This time we walked up to a small brick building, looking humble amongst the skyscrapers. There were no huge windows on this one, so my guide opened the door and let me inside.

My eyes widened, and the confusion and fear that bubbled through my stomach and head was stymied with a warm, soothing sensation that ran like a fluid through my veins. The room was cozy, wooden walls adorned with landscape paintings of waterfalls and fields and mountains, an amber-brown carpet so soft it could be a giant slipper, an open fireplace at the back wall with a mounted trophy fish placed above it. Dark red couches lined the walls, and overstuffed chairs sat at angles to the fireplace. Most prominent though, were the rows and rows of shelves filled with books. I walked up to these, feeling warmer and happier as I sank deeper into the feeling of the place. I ran my hands over the books, felt their spines, leafed through the pages.

“Follow me,” said my guide. I put the book I was flipping through back on the shelf and fell in stride with him, mouth hanging open with awe at this place. He opened a door, an ornate, woodworked door just like I love, and it opened up to a smaller room. A desk with all the luster and wood stain sat there against the wall, leather bound books on literature sat on a bookcase pressed against the right-hand wall. A small bed was pressed against the left wall, and a television hung on the wall at the foot end of it. On the desk sat a cup full of pens and pencils, sharp and gleaming. Upon opening the drawers I found stacks and stacks of bleach white and sky blue lined paper, crisper than snow.

“I don’t understand,” I said as I rested a hand on the desk. I looked at the floor and wiggled my toes in my shoes. I wanted to take them off and stay a while.

“This is a world we thought you’d love,” said my guide. “But it’s one thing to think, another to feel.”

I furrowed my brow, and looked his way. “What does that mean?”

My guide smiled. “Make this your happy place.”

***

            My calves were starting to burn as we approached the final steps towards the roof on one of the never ending buildings. This one had been devoted to music, and floor after floor had a different band I liked on each. As the music rang in my ears, I had been shaking with nerves. My guide would just smile and encourage me onwards when I questioned what we were doing.

            I held my arm above my head to shield my eyes from the blinding sun as we stepped onto the roof. My guide squinted, but he pointed outwards towards the metropolis, and we faced that way, putting the sun to our backs.

            “Go ahead,” my guide said. I raised my eyebrows and looked at him. Blood blasted through my veins to my fists.

            “What,” I began, gritting my teeth, “Is even going on here?” I glared at him. He chuckled.

            “I don’t know,” he replied with a shrug. He looked to me and smiled that smile that was becoming too familiar. “But you do.”

            “I clicked on an app in my iPad, and now I’m in some nonsense magical city custom made for me.” I shrugged, feeling the anger give way to sorrow. I bowed my head. “I wanna go home.”

“Oh, you’re still there,” said my guide, tilting his head and looking at me. “But you came here for a reason.”

I set my jaw, started to shake. “Give me a straight answer,” I snarled. The small muscles of my face trembled, and I threw my arm out in frustration at the metropolis.

An explosion echoed in the distance, the concussive wave hit my guide and I like a punch in the ribs.

I looked out at the metropolis, jaw dropped in awe. One of the skyscrapers crumbled, tongues of fire ripped into the sky as it collapsed in a mushroom cloud of ash and dust. I looked down at the hand I had thrown in my expression of anger.

“The people-“ I began with eyes wide, but the guide held up a hand and smiled.

“You can’t be hurt here. They’ll have gotten away,” the guide said with a dismissive wave. “You could be gentler though.”

 At this, I knew what to do. “I don’t think that building is necessary,” I said, still shaken, pointing to a skyscraper that had specialized in root beer, which was something like my third favorite soda. As I moved my hand back to my side, the entire building twitched.

            I looked at my guide, bewildered. He only smiled.

            I pointed again at the building, and “swiped” down. The entire building collapsed, falling so hard a pillar of dust taller than the building ever was shot into the sky, tremendous crashing noises echoed off of the remaining buildings and hit us again, this time not as hard. I looked to my guide again, and he nodded.

            I dusted myself off and pointed to the next building, I think it was about painting, and with a flick of my wrist it was annihilated, crumpled to dust in another tremendous showcase of violence. I swiped again at another one, and another, and another, and crash after crash after crash resounded through the air as I played God and destroyed everything I loved. My mind shut down, and my guide’s words made sense as steel twisted, sparks flew and windows smashed: it’s one thing to think, another to feel. This was happiness; a beautiful catastrophe, and soon all that was left was the building I stood on, the giant pillow, and the humble library, sitting pristine and somehow untouched amongst the carnage.

            I looked to my guide, and held my hand to my pounding heart. He looked back at me, and smiled yet again. I knelt down, moved the hand from my chest to the coarse, cement roof, as real-feeling as the sidewalk outside school, and swept it away.

            I fell fast, cutting through the dust and debris and somehow managing to not be smashed by a support beam or sliced by massive sheets of broken glass as I hurtled downwards through the air. I twisted my body as I fell, pointed to the giant feather pillow, and with a quick swiping motion pulled it beneath me. I landed in another poof of feathers, and waited for the second thud of my guide, but it never came. I looked up, blocking the sun that shone a hundred times brighter now, but couldn’t find him. I felt in my guts that his absence was a sign of progress. His aloofness had been getting on my nerves anyways.

I rolled off of the pillow and looked at the scrap-metal wasteland about me. I lifted my hands again, and this time lifted the tons piled upon tons of material into the air just above my head. Millions of nuts and bolts and thousands of support beams and endless furnishings and broken glass took to the air, shone brilliant in the sun for a moment, and with a twist of my hips and a sweep of my arm I threw it all into the sky, shot-put style, and I was left with a library, a giant pillow, and land that went on as far as I could see.

            I walked to the library, the pavement fading beneath my feet like an old painting into vibrant grass. Somehow the place seemed more alive now that it was empty.  I stepped inside the library and plopped into one of the chairs by the fireplace, which lit the shaded room. I took a deep breath, and looked into the gentle flames, letting my head sink into my hand.

***

            I awoke with a start, gasping, in my bed back home. I looked left and right, clutching my sheets. Same worn desk. Same packed boxes. Same window, same lake. Home. My breathing slowed, and I managed to get myself out of bed. I gave my iPad a funny look, then went downstairs to start my day.

            I lived the day the way I had been all summer. I visited my sweetheart, we watched a movie. Then I drove the dirt path home and I played outside with my little brother like I was a kid again, fishing and throwing apples and playing basketball until we were sweaty and grass stained and exhausted. Then we went inside and played video games until our eyes drooped closed more often than they stayed open, and we went to our respective rooms. I couldn’t say what he and my girlfriend were feeling, but every day and night we did this act, and my heart filled to the brim with emotion that threatened to break me down at the knees at any moment. On that sandy basketball court, with a fishing pole in my hand, as we sat in the living room together; it was fun and exhausting and horrible, and while I wanted to cling to every second of childhood I had left, time seemed determined to cut it short.

                                                                                                                        ***

            I laid there in the wrong bed. The wrong place. The wrong lake sat outside. The street was painted yellow and white. Sirens, shouts, music, the sheer noise left me crushing my pillow in my fists. The move had been awful. I had cried after they drove away, and even worse, watched them cry as they did so.

If the nights back home had been hard, this first college night in my lofted, undersized, uncomfortable bed was apocalyptic. My roommate was off having fun with some friends I imagine. In our brief interactions thus far he had said he didn’t like it much at home, so the move was easy, even happy. I envied him in a way he’d never understand. I swiped around on my iPad, eyes rubbed raw and mind so frantic sleep was almost comically out of the question. Everything seemed such a mess, I decided I might as well add to the chaos. I swiped to the screen, and poked the button.

The room exploded again, and after my free fall I was back on the pillow before I knew it. Things looked as I left them, pillow and library on an expansive field of grass that seemed to never end.

I started walking. With the inherent drama from falling into a new plane of existence, I had lost my sense of direction, and so I proceeded into this blank world with a blind determination.

As my legs turned over and over on the lush grass, I had just started to wonder why I wasn’t getting tired when the monotonous pad of shoes on grass was interrupted with the distant hum of an engine. I slowed to a cautious stop, and like a fly on a tapestry I could see the vehicle approaching from a great distance. I stayed my ground. The look of the vehicle sharpened, the volume of the engine escalated and reverberated off of miles of nothing. I watched as the grass flattened before the truck’s tires as it pulled up next to me.

f           “Lost?” My eyelids tore apart. My best friend, Mike, stepped out of his truck, his overwhelming blue truck. Chris Griffin’s shirt from Family Guy blue. He walked my way and extended a hand. My arm wobbled as I shook it.

“What are you doing here?” I tripped all over the words. It seemed like a stupid question. Perhaps “Where are we?” or “Why do I go flying through a vortex of infinite destruction and confusion every time I press an app on my tablet device?” would be more suitable. I wrung my hands through my hair as he laughed.

“Tumblr,” he replied with a shrug.

“Don’t,” I sighed, closing my eyes and shaking my head, “Don’t this with me right now,” I said, setting my jaw. For a moment I swore we were sitting on the blazing hot pavement underneath the tree outside of school during lunch. Why we sat on that scratchy, lava hot pavement every day and talked about nonsense while eating Combos and Gummy Worms instead of getting a solid meal with everybody else, I don’t know. But it was perfect, and it was us. And it was over: we had gone our separate ways to separate colleges.

And then there it was, with that memory and that thought came the bubbling, boiling, terrible emotion that ate at my guts like acid. I blinked and shook my head. Mike came back into focus, the effort to restrain the laughter on his face was blatant.

“Yeah,” he said. “The social media site. Tumblr. Here you are.” I could only shake my head in disbelief. Mike gestured towards the truck, and we got in. He turned the key and we were on our way. 

He zipped about the grassy expanse at an obvious leisure for some time. Any attempt I made to ask a question ended with him just smiling and saying some dismissive thing like “Just wait.” If he weren’t my best friend, I might have murdered him. I considered it anyways.

My hands were just starting to ache from wringing them together when buildings rose on the horizon. I perked up, and Mike glided the truck into a small parking lot outside of a quaint looking building.

The inside of the building was covered with paintings of mythological beasts and Greek gods. Zeus and Poseidon and Hephaestus and Apollo and Hermes and Hades and Ares and that one woman who looked like she could bench press Mike’s truck and probably the parking lot it sat on. I wasn’t much for Mythology, but Mike breathed it. He stood in the middle of the room, hands in his pockets, looking around at his paradise. He was picture perfect happiness. And as we walked about what was his town, so clearly his town, it started to fall into place. He told me, as we strolled into what looked like a laboratory, how massive the Tumblr world is. He pointed to an immaculate white wall with a sheen to it, and swiped his finger over. Charts and graphs and numbers slid into our view, the words “Tumblr Statistics” headed the images. He pointed at them and began to explain the world in numbers. He pinched in the air, and zoomed in on one stat. It explained how Tumblr has grown by two thirds of its population in the last year (Press). He swiped over and brought about the next one, how there’s more than 1.5 hundred million “towns,” or pages (Social). He reassured me though, that but he hasn’t seen a soul besides those he looked for. He swiped again for another stat, a colorful bar graph showing how more than a third of the residents of this Tumblr world are less than 25 years old (Tumblr). He swiped a final time, how more than half of these Tumblr denizens are getting a college education, just like us (Network). I stared at the statistics, and felt my shoulders sink.

This was significant, my shoulders sinking. I never realized it, but when I was distressed my shoulders would climb higher and higher towards my ears and they stay there. Sometimes the sharp pain of muscles snapping loose as I lowered them hurt enough to where I’d lose my breath. It wasn’t like that this time though. As Tumblr became clearer to me, in numbers and in words, my muscles relaxed, my heart slowed, and my mind stopped buzzing. I felt great, almost euphoric.

We explored the rest of his modest but intriguing buildings. Soccer, actors and actresses, comedy, all of the things Mike found interesting. He hadn’t seemed this happy since those days on the hot sidewalk when the world was so far away. I realized then in a moment of bliss that tingled through my body that I wasn’t alone, and just what Tumblr was.

“It’s magic. Everything we ever dreamed of in a website,” Mike said with a shrug as he shook my hand in the courtyard. I nodded, and I felt a shine take to my eyes.

“I’ll be seeing you around,” I said, and I smiled a toothy smile that mirrored on both of our faces. I snapped my fingers. My car appeared, the car from high school, the torn, scratched, bumpy old thing with a broken driver’s door handle, and with a temporary good-bye wave, I hopped inside. The pillow and the library sat as dots on the horizon. I zipped towards them in my little car. I held my arm out the window as I went, and I played artist. The grass and air distorted about me and my car, it swirled into colors and shapes and soon “physical” figures as I drove along. Pine trees flirting with the clouds, colorful bushes and gorgeous flowers and rocks and a gravel road crunching beneath my tires; my arm was a brush, and I painted the road to home at 60 miles an hour. I reached out my window to flip the handle and let myself out. As I walked towards the library, I erected a staircase and climbed onto the roof.

They say it took God seven days to create the world. God must not have had Tumblr.

I took a deep breath and felt every muscle relax, like walking into a warm room from a blizzard. I exhaled and sharpened my focus. I pointed to the ground, and with a swipe of my hand I began a spree of creation. Buildings crafted to my exact liking burst upward upwards, immense ripping noises echoed off of miles of nothing as the ground gave way to my preferred perfection. Up came an aquarium. A museum. A gym. A video game shop. A fishing shack. A house. I created until sweat dropped from my hair and the breath teased itself out of my lungs.

           I looked around at my buildings. They were few and far between, separated by grass and dirt trails leading to one another. They were small and humble, woodworked with slate roofs, the kind of architecture that made me feel at home. I wiped the sweat from my brow, and turned to the outskirt of my town, where a vast expanse of grass lay. I caught my breath, and felt the shoulders and triceps of both of my arms flex to their full extent, every vein from my chest to my fingers popped as I lifted upwards and tore a half mile of land up from the ground, and with a mighty sweep of my arms, it was thrown out of the atmosphere. A massive hole sat before me now, curved and molded to the exact shape of the lake across the street at home, and with a snap of my fingers, a massive wall of water fell from the sky, crushing the dust cloud that had risen with the commotion and splashing me a quarter mile away. I wiped the dirty water and mud from my face and grinned. Perfection unfolded before me as I waved my hand and the dirt and grass clumps and mess was shot away.

           Then, at a suffocating volume, my favorite song began to play. My heels scraped on the library’s roof as I turned and looked about, confusion contorting my face.

           I woke up, gasping, and slapped my phone until the alarm stopped. I put a hand over my eyes and groaned when I realized where I was, or rather where I wasn’t. I rolled over, and in a hazy moment felt the bottom fall from beneath me, and I fell off of the loft. I shouted as I cracked my ribs on the wooden chair beneath my desk. I coughed, wheezing as air tried to rush back to my deflated lungs, and like that I realized I was awake. I rolled out of my awkward position, slumped into my chair, air reluctant in my lungs, and sighed. After a few minutes of staring at my bare feet, feeling the warmth of my blankets ebb from my slouched body, I shrugged. With a great, shuddering, life changing breath, I forced a small smile.

***

           I’d return to Tumblr every night before bed. I became used to the free fall onto the giant pillow. I’d visit my aquarium and the few but precious people that began to visit my town. I’d take a walk down my gravel road amongst the trees. I’d play video games in the replica of my house and look out at the unpainted road I had created so people could visit. I’d look over the apple trees and past the long lawn at the shining lake until its call overcame me, and I’d go fishing for hours on my rickety but trusty rowboat. Once I wore myself out, I’d lounge on the pillow or read and write in the library and smile and smile and smile. With some words of encouragement from Mike and I, we invited people to the Tumblr world from the outside world, my sweetheart even, and they were given the default metropolis and they destroyed and they created and we visited each other and for all the world it was like we weren’t apart at all.

           Such a simple thing, I thought with a little, happy tear. I wiped it away as I drove to my real home for a visit, and the paint disappeared from the roadway as I turned down my road. Such a simple thing that abolished all the fear a complete abandonment of everything I knew brought about.

           I supposed, as I turned into my driveway, gravel crunching beneath my tires, it wasn’t an abandonment. Change, not destruction. But even if good-bye wasn’t forever, Tumblr was important. It was home when I couldn’t be home. I rolled down my window and let myself out.

           My roommate probably wondered where I went every night, I thought as I looked at the crown. I flipped off the light and lied down in bed. I told myself if he’d ever ask, I’d tell him it was somewhere perfect. I looked out at my lake, a dark glistening mirror, the one on Earth.

           Not as good as home, but perfect.

Works Cited

“Press Information.” Tumblr. n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2013

“Pinterest is the Growing Global Social Network.” Jeffbulas. n.p, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2013

“20 Tumblr Stats Marketers Can’t Ignore.” Searchenginepeople. n.p, n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2013

“Tumblr Blog Network.” Quantcast. Tumblr. n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 201