Game of Telephones

“Hello, my honey,

Hello, my baby,

Hello, my ragtime gal,

Send me a kiss by wire,

Baby, My heart’s on fire,”

Legend has it that the song was written as a comical criticism of the concept of expressing deep emotions over the telephone. Anything important to be said could hardly be adequately expressed over this device between us, which stripped conversations of the vital subtle languages which telephone could not translate.

The comparison with modern attitudes would suggest this satire failed to make and maintain its point. Today most people would act affronted by any serious matter being addressed in person, preferring that it all be handled by an even further insecure and ineffective, sterilized and distorted mode of communication – text.

This had become a problem for all people, however X had been acutely confronted with the facts – that not only were technological communications egregiously vulnerable to misinterpretation, but to fraud and other interferences as well. She, nor anyone else, was proving able to determine what was real when it came to screens, though they provided convenient narratives to patch the gaps. She sat with her phone trying to figure out how to address her housemates with concerns of the slander that circled her home like a vulture. She knew that anything she wrote, taken in poor timing and warped context, was liable to fuel and fan the fanged fanfare. She was tempted not to respond at all, for how any engagement seemed to be taken as “proof” against her, by people so inclined to seek. Alas, it contradicted her truth and ethics to pretend it didn’t matter, when she knew quite well that compounding slander killed many good people, and harmed many more.

What she had to demonstrate was herself, in truth, but she was ever less invited and inclined to be around to stand in contest to the rumours the more she became eclipsed by them. The way she had been so severely misrepresented in her forced absence for so long had formed its own entity which seemed to hunt her relentlessly. She had been abused into providing profuse explanations that would only be further held against her in the court of private opinions.

After having been so groomed to be an open book and easy read, she was inclined to volunteer ample material to be used against her. Others, having no concept of cooperating with human traffickers, were inclined to misuse her transparency to feed their own egregore’s. For so much of her life she had been made to answer to lies about her so much that she seldom got to practice living in her truth, truly. So much energy was lost to protections which seemed to keep her shackled to that which she needed protection from. She was compelled to learn how to “play” the situation, while trying, contrarily, to resist the expectation to “play” anything. Being an honest person of good will, integrity and openness to correction, she thought, she should be able to live candidly, but this got her in trouble all too often, through the frames laid out over her like traps. She did not want to play anymore, like she imagined anyone in a war torn state would wish to no longer be at war.

X stared down at the phone, then at the notepad she had been drafting letters on. When it comes to people who partake in backbiting, gossip, slander, cancelling and smear campaigns, whoever addressed the situation directly was automatically dubbed the aggressor, even though it seemed that that person who was most afflicted, was also likely the most victimized by the situation, though onlookers seemed to take it as a confirmation bias. She could word it countless ways, but no amount of phrasing would save her from being the subject of insurmountable scrutiny. Even though she knew that it mattered with life or death consequence, she had to train her focus away from empowering the hate and doubtful. She resolved that she could work up the gumption to just say, “hey, can we talk about this?” The truth did not win popularity contests, which is how people seemed to get their information these days.

“If you refuse me,

Honey, you’ll lose me

Then you’ll be left alone,

Oh, Baby, Telephone,

And tell me I’m your own”

Lovers text their deepest confessions. Judges make rulings over a game of fun house telephone. People grab their torchboxes and gun for the wrong ones. All while saying, “We know we trust these phones and their makers too much and they’re fucking us in the head” though dissonant from just how far from and close to the truth one can be at the same time.

X had recognized about 2 years prior, that there were people who knew everything that had been said about her over phones, and a culture conditioned into only ever being open about their feelings in the absence of the subject matter , her handlers knew infinitely more about how outsiders could come to hate her on hearsay alone, than she could. She was tired of trying to keep up with these computers. The people who were inclined to participate in this manner of witch hunt without knowing were legion, but she had to let them go if she ever hoped to identify anyone above it.

X wondered if anyone resistant to this manner of collective coercion remained, or if she was of the last of her kind left, or if she had only been made to feel this way. She was the common denominator for so much hate, like so many other minorities had been, and although people performed and signalled virtues suggesting they knew and believed and behaved better, their actions against her demonstrated otherwise. Through being made to consider them so vigilantly, she found her predictions of their thoughts infecting her own. She had to stop entertaining them, though they actively consumed her.

Time and again, people refused to hear her in person, spoke excessively of her in her absence and she would be relegated to a one-sided text thread they would ignore but to scan for key words they would use against her and pretend themselves to be the victim while actively victimizing her in retaliation to their own deluded sense of her and her words. No more. If people would not hear her in person, she resolved, they would not hear her at all. If people wanted to prioritize their abusive relationships with their screens and storytime slander, she wan’t going to stop them. She could only hope to allow them to identify themselves, stay guarded, and steer clear, head above the milled rumours and subliminal sadism.

X addressed her housemate to find that her fears hadn’t reached so far as she felt them in predicative projection. She was living in a narrative based on her own collection of heresay, history and story, as well.

“I don’t want to act on heresay while asking others not to do the same.”

Was a wise line which anchored her to the shores of reality while she had been twisted in the winds of potential. She had been regularly baited for reaction in her life and this time she was proud to have responded, in person, to inspect for truth. X had been more swayed by the gossip than anyone else she could see, and it was her own response that was hers to control, her wolves to feed. She resolved that she could not adequately live in contest to the lies while she was consumed by, by giving them her weight. She felt herself grow lighter between waves of concern that she was not getting honest accounts,

“One sure way to beat a chess computer which learns from your every move is to stop playing.”

She didn’t quite yet know how to stop the game, truly, drama still indistinguishable from trauma, poisoned past inflicting contamination upon present and future, but she knew that divesting her personal communications from screens was a sure start. These were tools of social engineering, and she had already been augmented beyond comprehension as it was. She tarried the line between the danger and the need as best as she could fathom at any given moment.