The object
By Anaëlle Gonzalez (30.10.2025)
its spine against the dawn
—magnificent and flat.
I heard birds sing through the wind
in my meditation app.
I saw sunsets rehearsed, forests framed
and the moon adjusted for brightness.
I frowned at the pain parading the screen
—children dying, a school shooting,
felt outrage for what happens overseas,
posted so everyone could see, then
ignored the man in the street
asking for something to eat.
I saw a video of the ocean, a thousand
kilometres of deep blue light,
a whale rose from the waves,
I double-tapped it to life.
I blinked out of the stream but mind still
scrolled after object went dark.
Today I lived something I
couldn’t wait to show for it to exist,
moments not there to be felt
—but to be posted.
I watched hours dissolve,
mind blank from all it’d seen,
unsure which lives from
those I consumed I wanted.
I ignored friends, hard conversations
and reached for object to forget,
filled my heart with others’ joy,
my memory with others’ lessons.
I spent seasons drinking from
a river object that leaves my eyes dry,
wandering bright fields of other people’s lives.
But body cannot resist the seduction,
cannot free me from compulsion.
Today I went out but the pond looked
smaller than the seas I had scrolled,
the lilies less radiant,
the suffering less convenient.
I dream myself back into body,
to earn scars that tell stories,
to show it can hold softness and grief.
But object calls again—softly, urgently,
showing me all that I should care about.
Some days I want to go back,
not before object but before my fear to try,
before forgetting that the real sky
has weather, that strangers mean no danger,
that dancing is safe, and grass here to be felt.
Object,
—please vanish,
so body remembers itself,
so body knows the touch of wind,
the smell and texture of things,
so hands are marked by work and mind by ideas,
so eyes see the morning as it truly appears,
and heart is full of the moments it has lived.
© Anaëlle Gonzalez. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are free to share these poems for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, and without modification.