The Selfie

THE SELFIE

Once a selfie failed to recognize itself.
“Where am I?” A question the selfie would never have asked itself before had suddenly taken front and center, casting all else into darkness.
Accustomed to being the only thing of importance wherever it found itself, the selfie had never paid much attention to what the background for its presence held. Rarely was the background even in focus. Some monument or some painting or some mountain or some signpost or somebody who was a friend once, whatever. What had it really mattered? The moment was all that had counted, and the moment only counted because the selfie was there at its center.
So why couldn’t it identify itself for sure at the center now? Was its tearing up in frustration at this failure the reason? Or was there in fact a void at the center of the selfie that it had been and apparently still was unable to discern?
With so much of its psyche now a matter of “if” rather than “what,” the selfie was at a loss for how and where to find validation of its existence. “I smile and hold up two fingers, therefore I am” no longer provided the reassurance it always had before of the selfie’s very being. Nor did the endless uploads to the Cloud and postings to the Internet prove that the selfie actually existed beyond the virtual world.
“Would buying a superphone with multiple camera lenses help me find myself at the center of everything once again?” the selfie anxiously asked itself. Would there still be time to retrace all of its days spent someplace or other around the globe to document its one-time presence there as proof it had in fact mattered in some snapshot way at least, and thus it still did matter?
Suppose, however, some of the places where the selfie had felt it was at its most photogenic were closed down for one reason or another and no amount of pounding on locked doors would open them up. Would it be forced to settle for an embarrassing snap with some random passerby who ruined everything by taking the focus off the selfie with a goofball expression and two raised fingers of their own?
What was the selfie to do if it wasn’t able to prove it was who it thought it was either at this moment or in the past? And how would it hold back tears in the future when someone it considered a BFF said, “I’m afraid I can’t find you in this scene. Can you point yourself out for me?”