Treadmill

XIII.I

I've always liked to read.

I feel like I'm opening these with one-liners that are super annoying and not at all going to catch your attention, but it's whatever. Reading isn't exciting. But I also don't mean it in an 'I'm so quirky, look at me!' kind of way. You know what? Whatever. I don't need to defend myself. You're the one reading this. So maybe you like to read as well.

I've always liked a lot of things, to be honest. I've always liked to drink my water with cucumbers, even though it started as trying to copy the fitness bloggers that I worshipped. But I genuinely enjoyed it anyways. I've always liked writing. I've always liked school. I've always liked work, even. I've always liked social media.

But that last one can be tricky. I feel like we get so involved in social media, to the point that you can go down a rabbit hole that lasts forever. I like to use this example when trying to explain how I feel my generation interacts with social media: there was this girl in my Gender Studies class Spring semester that was dating this football player who played for South Carolina (our main rival, for those of you who don't care about college football.) She had been dating the dude since high school, and she would talk about him constantly.

I would show up to class and this girl would spend every last second until our professor showed up talking to the girl who sat behind her about this boyfriend. She would talk about his stats from the last game, about how much he could bench, about how great he was and how much she loved going to his games despite the fact that she went to Clemson. She would talk about him like he was some Greek god for doing super simple things, like 'letting' her watch the show she wanted. It was bizarre.

It was bizarre, but I would still listen intently, from across the room, every class period, because I was fascinated. And I wanted to be able to text Celeste about it to make fun of the girl.

I feel like that's how we are with social media. Or at least, how I am with social media. We get so wrapped up in other people's lives and sometimes it's literally to make fun of them. And other times it's to make fun of them on the surface while genuinely, deep down, being curious about these people we don't know at all.

If social media didn't exist, I wonder if we'd be as curious as we are. I wonder if we would care about the things we care about today. I wonder if I would have cared about Kennedy Abrams at all if I hadn't seen her Instagram pop up on my Explore page my freshman year and been insanely curious about her since then.

Anyways, I've always liked social media for its curiosity the curiosity it can cultivate. I've also always loved reading for a similar reason: reading can take us to different worlds and explore our curiosity with people who don't exist, instead of people we know—or wish we knew—through social media.

This is a really long way of me winding down to saying that reading the news can make you wish that curiosity didn't exist at all.

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Rebecca woke up Tuesday morning to an empty room and a note on the bedside table separating the two beds:

I'm going to go fix it. Be back in a few hours. Try to pack. -K

Rebecca rolled her eyes and pulled out her phone, figuring she had time to scroll through Instagram before rushing to pack everything up—all three things she had actually taken out of her suitcase since arriving.

Instagram was just like usual, except for one notable exception: Kennedy had evidently posted to Drew's ever-growing account before Rebecca had woken up, accompanying the sunset picture of herself with the caption 'I could stay here forever' and a location tag at Miami Beach—a full 282 miles from Tampa.