By Sofiya Ivanova
Trigger warning: suicide
I google your name
between refreshing my Pinterest feed
and scrolling on YouTube shorts,
like flipping through the morning newspaper with a sluggish hand.
Autocomplete takes the ugly words from my mouth:
your name followed by “suicide”
your name followed by “arrest”
your name followed by “funeral”
your name followed by our high school:
Your picture day portrait on Google Images
is like a monochrome child on the back of a milk carton,
which I drain anyway, then crumple up the soggy cardboard.
Your quarter-smile is worse
than the stock photos
of body bags on stretchers
and police car lights
they pair with your photo as clickbait
for articles taxidermied with
“a loss deeply felt by the community” and “bright light” and
“get the help you need.”
I google your name
squatting on the toilet
and hunching over my phone in the cafeteria line—
you know when you say a word so many times that
the syllables unravel in your mouth,
the sounds hollowing out like
your side of the chess board
or your desk at school?
My fingers float toward the keys
as if I’m using a ouija board,
which might not be a bad idea at this point,
because all of the internet—
each of the 130 trillion pages—
stares back at me with the same blank expression.
I wish I could google
what was on your
computer
I wish I could google
the glint on your glasses as you were
paraded through the hallways and
shown out the door
I wish I could google
the homework questions I sent you
from my school email, now deactivated,
and your witty responses,
always typed in blue
I wish I could google
“why?”
At the very least,
I wish I could google
your name followed by “obituary”
and find what I was searching for—
nothing but a death notice,
your life boiled down to two sentences.
No memorial in your classroom.
No news of the funeral.
So I gather up the scattered letters of your name,
delete them from my mind,
and close out the tab.
Sofiya Ivanova (she/her) ‘27 is a lifelong “rhyme-writer,” as she declared at just three years old. Now, her work has been published in Perception magazine, several anthologies, and in a solo collection, Hindsight. Having immigrated from Russia as a child and overcome Lyme disease as a teenager, she received the prestigious Coronat scholarship to study psychology & creative writing.
