In The Spotlight

Pin- Hazy Dreams

They say curiosity killed the cat. But that phrase never sat right with me. If we weren't curious, we would be living in the dark ages. Heck, we'd be living in cave times.

But some brave early man wondered what would happen if you put a seed in the ground. Some "crazy" Mesopotamian wondered if there was a way to record things for later. The great Greeks & Romans wondered about wondering, and now the greatest scholars of today wonder about them.

Because of this, I am a curious person. I am convinced that if you question and observe, you will find the truth. Even make a big break.

When I saw it in my twitter feed, I didn't believe it was real. A few seconds of looking, however, proved it wasn't just some trick of the light.

There was a Leafy fan out there.

I showed the group. If it weren't for me, we probably could have lived in blissful ignorance for a few days, hours at least. That could have been the end of it.

But I am a curious person. I'm less likely to follow a rabbit hole than I am to dig my own. For me, it isn't that one thing leads to the next, it's that I lead myself to the next thing. It makes it pretty difficult to function when I constantly create issues that don't yet exist.

So, my bad habits getting the better of me, I searched the tag 'QNA' on twitter, TikTok, insta, pretty much everything. We were trending. It was weird to say the least.

These people who had never met me loved me. I had more than tripled my following in hours. I'd always dreamed of this. I'd figured it'd be for- well, anything else.

I reported my findings to my new friends. First it was pretty tame. Edits of people's favorite teams and players. It was almost a little funny being idolized like that. I was an aspiring actress and baker who spent her whole life failing at everything she did.

"To celebrate our newfound fame, I'm getting us all beers. Cool?" It was indeed cool.

Once we got our liquid courage, I scrolled to the next post. I stopped dead in my tracks. To anyone else, it would have been fine, sweet even. But to those of us in the room and on the show, it was grotesque.

It was a new genre of psychological horror. It was disgusting to look at. It was a skin crawling nightmare from which I could not wake.

It was a ship edit.

Poor Firey and Leafy were overlayed with a love song. It was so much more than that. It was a signal that it could happen to any of us. Whoever had made this was using clips of things any two friends would do. No one was safe.

I passed the phone around, feeling suddenly nauseous. They are were horrified.

"It's funny, because when I was in middle school, I did that stuff all the time. Like, with real people," I told them. Memories flooded back of seeing celebrity friends on TV. I would squeal to my friends about how cute they would be together.

"But it's us. Like actual me, and actual him." Leafy said it in a trance, like she had been programmed to. "I need a moment." I wanted to tell her it was okay, that everything would work out fine, but something in my head said I shouldn't. I didn't understand how she felt, and how could I? I hadn't been shoved into a relationship with someone I barely knew. Whatever I was going to say would just make it worse.

The chair scraped across the floor with a nails-on-a-chalkboard screech, and Leafy headed toward the bathroom.

There was a new thickness in the room, like when you've plunged underwater. I could hear that words were being said, but I couldn't make them out. My vision felt blurry and delayed.