by Kelly Harms
“Let me see,” she says when we’re done. I show her, and she smiles, pleased with herself. “I guess I could use a lip filler, if I were the kind of person to get lip filler,” she says, but she is angling for compliments.
“Don’t you dare, Mom,” I oblige. “Leave the Juvéderm to us mortals.” I do not tell her I’ve actually already used an injectable, just under my nose, where something thin and crepey was beginning to reach toward my lips. She wouldn’t like knowing.
But after I schedule the coming week’s photos, dredge up some repeats to repost, shoot a few videos, cull the last three hours’ worth of trolls, and do a quick and selective set of responses to my comments, my mood starts to sink again. It’s time for me to check out of the B and B and go back to LA, and then it will be time to get back to the business of being me and to start a new work project: Operation Unmarry, in which I will have to tell my followers the wedding was a mistake and that we are going to annul it and get on with our lives, beg them to be kind to Tucker, say it was my fault, and Venmo Tucker a large amount of money. And then after that, the personal project: get over Tucker and get on with my life.
On the plus side, underdog Mia is on-brand. The @Mia&Mike ethos has been, at times, about picking up the pieces after a loss. After all, though I was a rising Pictey star when Mike was still with me, it was his passing that turned my followers into true devotees. When cancer came for my three-legged best friend too soon, it was my followers on Pictey that kept me from taking the short trip from grief to despair.
In real life, the statute of limitations for socially acceptable sorrow was far too short. The “real” people in my life forgot about him over the course of minutes. They’d ask me why my nose was so red, and I’d say that my dog had cancer and it was terminal, and they’d say, “Oh, your dog was so cute! That is so sad. Do you think you could sub for me at the six forty-five tomorrow morning? I’m going out tonight.”
Then later, when it was time to help him across the rainbow bridge, people would say, “Oh, I thought he was already gone. So sorry. Do you think you could mention my store on your feed, by any chance?” At night I’d go home, and he wouldn’t be there, not to greet me, not to sit directly on top of me and render it impossible to reach the remote, and not to crawl into the crook of my legs, where my knees bent when I slept on my side. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night, disoriented, and find I’d cried myself to sleep on his dog bed.
It was my Pictey followers that gave me the comfort I needed. When I lay in my dark apartment and wept for Mike, they didn’t ask me what was wrong. They asked for more memorial photos, more video, more memories. I was surrounded by thousands of people who missed him too. Who had lost pets of their own and had taken as long as they needed to get through it. Who encouraged me to do the same when it came to my very best friend. Knowing how loved Mike was, knowing I wasn’t mourning by myself, made all the difference in the world. It carried me through.
And it will carry me through again. I don’t care what it sounds like—losing my dog was a thousand times more painful than losing my fiancé. The love I had for that man was people love, with fights and recriminations and always the possibility of betrayal, the chance of our shining attraction softening into something dim and dull. With Mike, there was no possibility of betrayal. He was devoted to me, absolutely trustworthy, a walking, woofing heart and two bright eyes the color of agate. His entire guiding principle, sunup to sundown, was simply this: How can I make everyone feel loved today? And he was so good at it.
Mike and I had this burgundy love seat. It was more like one of those chair-and-a-half things; I must have gotten it secondhand. It now seems so utterly unlike me, more like something you’d find at Mom’s house. It was plush and sloppy and low; it never looked anything but rumpled. I kept a blanket on it because the fabric upholstery acted like Velcro to Mike’s hair, of which there was a lot, only some small portion of it actually on his body at any given time. The blanket was old, a college keeper my mom had given me on move-in day. It had a silky edge on it, and Mike licked that edge a lot when he first came home; the vet said it was anxiety, the same thing that made him pick at his stump and eat the baseboards of that old apartment whenever I went off to work.
Two weeks into our cohabitation, I looked around the tattered moldings and half-gnawed chair legs and told Mike, fine, he could come with me to the yoga studio. But, I added, there was to be no shedding there, and I said it clearly and firmly, and I think he must have believed me. I brought him into the back room, made him a nest in an always-open kennel with prized toys and a white noise machine. I put an air purifier in the studio and ran the HEPA vac nightly, and no one seemed bothered. Mike’s anxiety abated quickly, and in time, he ventured into the studio and began sitting on the platform with me during classes. He would often try to nap on my yoga mat while I was in downward-facing dog, and he’d be surprised when I moved into chaturanga, a modified sort of push-up hovering directly over him. He’d roll over just in case I wanted to somehow pet his tummy with my elbows. He’d breathe his hot puppy breath into my face.
Still, no one complained. In fact, more people started coming.
Mike noticed. He knew the students were there for him. He started sitting next to me during the opening. During the class proper, he puttered through the lines of mats, almost as though he were my assistant, ready to call my attention to a potentially unsafe back position in a twist or an especially beautiful triangle pose. His nails, however short I kept them, clicked slightly on the cork floors as he moved. When my students were in an inversion, he craned his head to one side from the back of the studio and seemed to smile at them. They all smiled back.
At the end of each class, I’d bring the students into a resting pose, flat on their backs, for quiet mindfulness. Mike seemed to notice this transition right away, and he didn’t like to be out on the floor when it happened. By the third or fourth class, he had learned to come back to the podium with me several cues before I started this portion of class, and his breathing was very loud by then from all his exertions. My students came to sigh with pleasure when they started hearing his panting over my headset, because they knew the hardest parts of class were almost over. Like magic, their bodies loosened and gave their all for five more minutes, knowing that after that, I would let them rest.
Mike and I taught hundreds of classes together. I put his name on the schedule next to mine, with a little note for allergy sufferers about how I would wet dust before and after the class and run allergen filters throughout. The sheer number of filters we went through probably wouldn’t have been worth it to some people. But to me it wasn’t an option to teach without him anymore. He and I had become an us. Mia and Mike. I haven’t taught a single live class since I went back to being just me.
Mom turns to me now, on the bed of the inn where we both are propped up side by side.
“Honey, we need to pack.” Her words are softer than usual and kind. While she is not exactly sympathetic about Tucker jilting me, she seems to understand that the next weeks and months are going to be hard.
“I don’t want to go,” I tell her, and she nods.
“I know. But you can’t stay here,” she says.
I tip my head back on the headboard. “I made a mess of things,” I say.
“Oh, you did not. You must have done something very right, to dodge a bullet like this.”
“Not all marriages are bullets,” I tell her.
“Of course not. But this one must have been. Or things would have been very different right now.”
She’s right about that, of course. I think back to the conversation with Tucker. I don’t want to spend my life with anyone who sees me as a fraud. I don’t care how right he may have been.
“When I go home to LA,” I tell her, “I have to tell everyone. I have to find a way to explain all this to so many people. What on earth am I going to tell my followers?”
My mom tsks. “You don’t have to tell them anything.
You don’t owe these people. They’re total strangers! You could quit the whole thing tomorrow, and no one would blame you.”
“Mom!” I say. “They would blame me. They’d be outraged. They’d be betrayed. They’d turn on me. They’d be hurt.”
“You give your little picture messages a lot of credit, missy,” says my mom.
“You don’t understand, Mom.” I’m not sure why I think she ever will, but I can’t seem to stop trying. “My followers count on me. Together we create community. I give them something they care about. I post about important values and start conversations about what matters most.”
My mom rolls her eyes. “Mia. Come on. You post pictures of wedding dresses on a website. You give people a distraction from their real lives and a false sense of familiarity that stands between them and having true connection, true community. Your impossible-to-live-up-to images make people think there’s no point in even trying to enjoy the messy real lives they have been given.”
I jut my chin out, maybe to look stronger than I am, or maybe to try to keep some tears in. I swallow. “Do you really mean these things when you say them to me,” I ask her, “or are you just trying to keep me humble?”
Mom pivots on the bed so she is sitting in what I call sukhasana and she calls crisscross applesauce, facing me. She takes my hands in hers. “What I say, I mean. But mostly I am sad when you live your entire life on a tiny screen. You’re a wonderful yoga teacher, or you used to be, and when I hear you speak about losing your brother or Mike, I get chills. You have a gift. Deep down, I think you are just looking for a way to share that gift.” She sighs heavily. “I only wish you found a more productive way to share it. If you were a photographer, a visual artist of some kind, I’d say, Great! Post your pictures online. But you’re, what, an ‘influencer’? Is that what you dreamed of being when you were eight years old? No! When you were eight years old you wanted to be a teacher.”
“I am a teacher,” I say. I think of the conversation that circled around that sad message a few days back. Sure, Pictey took it all down, but I saw the connections forming. Maybe somehow my followers did some good that day for someone who was feeling lost. Isn’t that something worth doing?
My mom lowers her voice. “When I look at your account, and I do sometimes look, I don’t see you, my beautiful girl. I see Mia Ampersand Mike TM. I see cheaply filtered phone pictures and staging and faking.”
I cringe. There is that word again. My throat feels constricted, and my eyes are getting hot.
She seems not to notice. “And look at how you reacted to this setback. You didn’t create truth or beauty or honest community. You faked it.”
I cough. “So you’re not criticizing me,” I say dryly, but inside I’m spinning out. First Tucker, and then my own mom. If people have so much trouble with my choices, why am I just hearing about it now?
But then, am I just hearing about it now? My mom has never made any secret of how she feels about online celebrity. It’s just that I’ve never much minded. After all, I make a living, I have nice things mailed to me every day, and I am so lucky that it’s hard to even keep a level head most of the time. And then there are the followers. No matter how people might see my tribe, I care about them; I believe in them. I want them to have what I have.
Except maybe not right now.
“All this talk,” I say, refusing to cry, “it’s just talk. You might be right. This might be all glass castles or a house of cards or any number of other architectural metaphors. But it is what it is. My career. My purpose. I need to keep it going, and I don’t know how to face it tomorrow.”
“Don’t,” says my mom. “Just don’t. Come home with me. Hike up the flat side of Mount Wyler. Take a picture from the top and post it and tell your followers you’re ok and all is well and you’ll see them when you see them. Then throw that damn phone into a canyon and live offline for a little while. See what life is like when you’re looking at it directly and not through a tiny screen.” She pauses. “Take some time to remember what your dreams really are.”
I shake my head. “I could never do that,” I say. “I’d leave people in the lurch. I would disappoint everyone. I’d lose ground in my crowded marketing space.”
But even as I protest, something in me has started singing. A tuning fork of recognition is vibrating in my soul. It’s singing in perfect pitch: Do it.
“I could never do that,” I say again, but now it’s feeling less true. “It would be bad for my career. It would set me back years.”
My mom stands up from the bed and pulls me up with her. “Would it?” she asks, and there’s a twinkle in her eye. “Or would it catapult you forward?”
PAIGE
It’s nearly a three-day drive from the outskirts of the valley to the top of the Denver metropolitan area. I get my oil changed after all. They check my tire pressure and put wiper fluid in and do all those things I know how to do technically but have never actually done myself, even though my dad tried to teach me how to be a good car owner. When I get back in my car afterward, I feel like it’s had a magical protection spell put on it and will now safely get me anywhere I want to go.
And it does. It takes me through the most desolate country I’ve ever seen, the middle of Nevada, and to Salt Lake City, where I have some truly fantastic mole and then spend the night on the east side in a two-star chain motel. When I pay the bill there, I think of all the money I’ve saved up simply by not having a life. No restaurant meals, no drinks out, no need for entertaining space in my apartment or spending money on travel. When I last looked at my cash savings, there were six figures in there, just sitting, ignored. I realize there could be a metaphor here about my remaining youth, but I staunchly refuse to acknowledge it.
I could, I tell myself, stay in a fancy resort and then linger over breakfast in bed complete with a 20 percent convenience fee before tip. But I don’t want to. I want to pay sixty-five dollars for the night, eat a partially frozen poppy seed muffin from the lobby, and get on with things. Besides, the area I’m headed to in Colorado will not be cheap.
The interesting thing about driving through the West, besides the sweeping landscapes and complete lack of meaningful radio, is that when one drives for eight hours a day, one cannot, even if one pulls to the side of the road for safety, use one’s phone. There is no service for hours at a time, and on the first day I start to visualize all the terrible things that might happen to a person driving without cell coverage in the desert in a ten-year-old car.
But after a bit of that nonsense, I stop at a filling station and load up the tank and buy two gallons of water and some protein bars and press on, giving myself a stern word about the pioneers and Lewis and Clark and so forth. While I gas up, I check my phone, but nothing loads. Still. So that’s it. I didn’t download any of my podcasts or audiobooks or music. I planned to stream everything. How tech centric of me. Now it’s just me and the radio. No one can reach me—not that anyone would want to—and nothing can invade my car bubble. No googling, no scrolling, no pinging, no nothing.
For a time, it almost feels liberating.
That time passes. While I understand the facts on technology dependence and appreciate that Steve Jobs was deeply concerned about how the iPhone would affect future generations, I happen to like the internet, and I don’t care who knows it. I like constant access to my public radio station. I like buying my groceries online. I like buying my everything online, really. I’m perfectly good at reading a map, but I prefer not to have to while driving at seventy-five miles per hour. When I feel myself craving the news, I want it to be from the last ten minutes, not from the night before.
Alas, there is only the USA Today national edition rack I pass en route to a gas station bathroom for hints on what’s happening in the world. The headline reads, South Dakota: The State of the Nation? I buy a copy on my way back to the car and scan the headlines before I start driving again. It says nothing about what I want to know: Is my sister doing ok? Will she be g
lad to see me or mystified at my sudden appearance?
These questions dog me as I drive and drive and drive. The only thing that helps is that no matter which oldies-station range I’m in, the DJ will play the “Golden Slumbers” medley at least once an hour.
Finally, on the third day of driving, I take out my phone at a Dunkin’ parking lot and see that I’m back in a solid service area. I have the usual nonsense notifications and get a chance to see what likely fraud influencer @Mia&Mike has posted, as the line for doughnuts crawls forward. The entire time I’ve been on the road, she’s only posted more of the same generic, meaningless phone-camera photos, most of them sponsored. Her latest post is the biggest insult to her fan base of all, a throwback photo, which is just a nice way of saying a rerun. The whole post is a rerun. All she’s added to the caption is, Still as true today as it was before . . . am I right?
No. You are not right, lady, I think, as I open my map application and hover my finger over the destination bar. There are a few places I can choose from.
The first, the most obvious, is my mother’s house. Lodging there is free, and further, she is my mother. To get there, I need to circle around Denver for about an hour to the east. Traffic being what it is, the app warns me to plan for an hour and a half just in case.
The second, also a reasonable plan, is to go straight to my sister’s hospital and stay in a motel nearby. It’s closer and in a more appealing area. It’s the ostensible purpose of my long drive. The time of arrival would give me decent odds that I wouldn’t run into my mom right away, or perhaps at all, especially if I just visit Jessica, spend the night, and then turn around and drive home. That’s probably what I should do.