He probably goes through girls like I go through books (I love books). Take this excerpt, for example: Ugh! How could he make me feel so special? All of this is fake and I know it. When I came across The Smiths a couple of years later, their slow-paced ballad “Unloveable” helped me understand this impulse: “I wear black on the outside / ’cause black is how I feel on the inside.” In a way, we all embodied Savannah when we used Tumblr.
#Tumblr aesthetic deep short quotes code#
This fashion was a kind of code it meant we shared the same feeling of misplacement and sadness. An air of mystique surrounded us in the form of a specific style: fishnets, cigarettes, Doc Martens, an American Apparel tennis skirt, a band T-shirt, tattoos, knee socks, cuffed jeans, black Converse, tote bags, dyed hair, denim jackets. We were dark, dangerous, and not like other girls. This is most often referred to as “soft grunge,” which has its own Wikipedia page that mentions Sky Ferreira, VSCO girls, and floral patterns. We liked to bask in purity and light, but it needed to have a sharp edge, a dark shadow hanging over it. Our aesthetic was complex, and even self-contradicting. The word pastel may seem to contrast dark and grunge. We were recreating ourselves we were being reborn. Suggested searches include: pastel, dark, grunge. A lot of sunsets, some flowers, hands reaching toward the moon, a city covered in thick fog. If you Google “Tumblr aesthetic,” the first result is a clutter of images, all dreamy. We were all collaborating on this collective exhibition, curating an endless mood board. It was like an international secret club.
Though there wasn’t a set name, it was something you just knew. Meme culture was on the rise, yet I receded into a less chaotic, more contained corner of the Internet that took itself very seriously. Obama was president and “Friday” by Rebecca Black was taking over the world.
I was one of millions of Gen Z girls navigating these digital landscapes upon coming home from school. So at age 11 I regularly began playing God. Slowly, I realized that world-building was at my fingertips. A sense of power surged through me as I signed up. This opened me up to a world of opportunities: YouTube, We Heart It, ooVoo, Instagram, 8tracks, and, most of all, Tumblr. I got an iPad for Christmas in 2011 after years of using my mom’s laptop for email and games. I could receive validation just for existing. This external gaze gave me a sense of purpose. I heard echoes of laughter whenever I muttered a joke to myself I imagined a wave of sympathy when I crawled into my bed and wept. Before I was given any sort of device or technology, I sometimes moved through life with the idea that I was not only being watched but being recorded by secret cameras and broadcasted to millions of people. I was born OctoI was alive for 9/11, but can’t say where I was. How is anyone supposed to keep up? I’ve lived a million lives in cyberspace. I have over ten email addresses each of which contain thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of emails each of which contain an unpredictable amount of words etc etc etc. We exist in periods and phases and then we move on. I’ve built so many worlds and have forgotten about all of them because the “permanent” nature of the online world doesn’t account for the ephemeral ways we live. I’ve been on the Internet forever I feel like I came out of the womb already tapping on an iPad. Savannah defends herself by asking, “If we went to a Lana Del Rey concert, and she started kissing you, would you stop her?” And this is just a little taste of the world I built, one I kept secret for years mostly because I forgot all about it.
Everyone is jealous, but especially Nicholas, who flips out when they finally pull away from each other. When Jesse eventually kisses Savannah (during the song, how romantic), they make out for what seems like a while in front of the whole audience. We are all collectively Savannah we live vicariously through her, imagining Jesse approaching us as he sings, “Let me hold both your hands / in the holes of my sweater.” (That is all being online is: living vicariously.) Savannah is at the show with her shitty boyfriend Nicholas (every good relationship in a fan fiction comes from a Good-Bad Boy replacing the Bad-Bad Boy). He stares at Savannah, our beloved protagonist who’s basically a stand-in for us readers. He’s getting swarmed by teenage fangirls, obviously, but he ignores them all. As Jesse Rutherford, the tatted-up bad boy frontman (who’s currently under fire for his recent relationship with the much-younger Billie Eilish and then writing a questionable song about it), performs “Sweater Weather,” he jumps into the crowd. One of my biggest secrets is that when I was 13 I wrote fan fiction about The Neighbourhood and it reached about 25,000 reads on Wattpad.
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