Metrics

When she joins Twitter you are her first follower. Before she has a profile picture. Before she has a bio. She’s an egg, blank and new, zero, zero, zero. And you are her first.

Within a week, however, she has twice as many followers as you. It’s as if Twitter is something she’s been waiting for all her life. Something which has been waiting for her. She’s never not on it. Updates her feed a hundred, two hundred times per day. As natural and as regular to her as breathing.

One month in, she has a hundred times your following. They shower her with hearts and retweets. She posts a picture of herself first thing in the morning – another before she goes to bed. She posts pictures of you as well: your big hand enveloping hers. A selfie of you kissing.  

“They like you,” she says. When she says they she is talking about her followers. An army of benign, invisible fans. “They think you’re good for me.”

You realise very quickly that she tells them everything. After fucking you lie tangled together in bedsheets. She fetches her phone from the bedside table and taps out an update. Tells them she came. Describes to them the exquisite ache she feels in the minutes afterwards. Tells them (just as she has often told you) how much she loves the feeling of spooning with you, your arm across her chest.

She kisses you, long and slow on the lips. It’s only after she pulls back that you notice she’s holding her phone. That the camera is rolling.

Her followers are like a pet. A part of her. An inquisitive, gently burbling army that surrounds her always. She asks you questions on their behalf. “Have you ever been skinny dipping,” she asks. Or, “Will you get another tattoo?” She plucks these questions from the air, like a seer consulting gods. You answer. She dutifully taps out your response.

She hits a million followers. One million. Three times the population of the city in which you live. More people that you will meet in a year. More people than you will know in your lifetime. Every now and then she is recognised in the street: people wave, or cheer, or call her name. She blushes with pleasure every time this happens.

You make your own Twitter profile private without really thinking about it. Within an hour she’s at your flat, arriving like a storm. She is furious. “It’s a waste,” she says. “A complete waste.” She stabs the screen of her phone. Think, she implores you, of how many followers you could have. And you wouldn’t even have to post anything. Wouldn’t have to do a damn thing. You’d get them just from being with her.

She bristles. Her followers (almost a million of them now) bristle too. Your phone shivers constantly on the surface of your desk and you don’t attend to it. She sees you not attending to it, and looks at you wounded. She throws herself onto your bed and lies curled up on her side, phone out, her face bluelit. “You should tell them something,” she says. “An explanation at least. You owe them that.”

“I don’t owe them anything,” you say. She snorts. Taps the screen in a rapid, angry staccato.

Later you fuck, roughly and at length. You think that it might be the last time. She bites your arm and you pull her hair, driving into her. She grunts, almost like a sob. Afterwards she sits on the end of your bed facing the mirror on your wardrobe. Musses her hair a little further. Smears her makeup with one finger, then takes a picture.

The argument is forgotten, but she’s distant after that. Her followers take up more and more of her time. She’s left her job. “Sorry,” she says, whenever you are together. “Sorry, sorry, just one minute.” She doesn’t want to leave them waiting, she explains. One minute and then she’ll be with you. She taps frantically, then slips the phone away into her bag. It buzzes in the dark there like a trapped animal.

She has two million followers now. The number is growing faster now. Crazily, recklessly fast. She’ll hit three million within a month. The speed with which that number changes makes you feel faintly sick. Vertiginous. As though the ground is dropping away from beneath your feet.

She wears brand new clothes each day now. She smells different. You do not fuck anymore, but she cuddles with you in her bed while she replies to messages. Kisses you for the camera. Requests, on one occasion, that you give her a love bite in the crook of her neck. It takes two tries before she is satisfied. If you fall asleep she is gone by the time you wake.

You have an argument. A brief, violent, stupid one. It comes from nothing, and it absorbs everything. “You’re jealous,” she says. “This is the best thing that has ever happened to me and you can’t just be happy for me. You have to ruin it, don’t you?”

There are many things you want to say. All of them sound, in your head, childish and simplistic and dumbly jealous. You say them anyway. She has her phone in her hand and as you say these things you can sense the weight of the three million ghosts in the air around her, packing the room so dense there isn’t air, so full of breathing watching needing bodies that you can’t see her anymore, that you don’t know who you’re talking to.

She tells you to leave. She’s crying. You do and it is windy outside. The air as heavy as it gets before a storm. You walk at random until the fire in your gut dies down. You call an Uber. As you’re waiting outside a corner shop a middle-aged man with baggy eyes lurches up to you and grabs your forearm. “You broke her heart, you asshole. Asshole.” He releases you. He’s gone.

The back of your Uber is warm and dim. The driver eyes you in the mirror. “I always thought you were bad for her,” he says. You tell him to stop the car and let you out there. You’ll walk the rest of the way. Which you do, but a group of teenage girls follows you, whispering behind their hands. Is it him? It’s him. It’s definitely him. Outside your apartment door a skinny boy rife with piercings spits on the ground at your feet.

You get inside. You lock the door. You turn off your computer. You turn off your phone. Your apartment is dark and quiet. Nothing buzzing or blipping or humming as it charges. The view from your window looks out across the city. Night is falling. Her ghosts are out there, stalking the streets. The ground is falling away beneath your feet.

You draw the curtains. You lie down in the dark and wait. In your head you are repeating it over and over again. You don’t owe them anything. You don’t owe them anything.