BY LISA MARIE BASILE

It's so easy to turn to social media for validation. We've learned to measure our life in likes and follows, hoping to fill the black hole caused by, ironically, choosing to digitally project rather than connect with actual, real-life human beings. I know I do, sometimes. And it makes me feel cheap. I go to bed numb, wondering why I even posted that, and if the shamers are somehow right, if the #selfie is actually the mark of Satan, and if I've given in, like a weakling, absorbing the millisecond of approval gained from bored click-click-clickers who don't know a thing about me.

The Internet is a scary place.

An Instagram star can quit social media (and getting paid $2000 to post a picture of a dress) and then cry into a video about how she's found the light - only to be told she's fucking histrionic and doing it for attention.

“This is what I like to call a perfectly contrived candid shot. Nothing is candid about this. While yes going for a morning jog and ocean swim before school was fun, I felt the strong desire to pose with my thighs just apart #thighgap boobs pushed up #vsdoublepaddingtop and face away because obviously my body is my most likeable asset. Like this photo for my efforts to convince you that I’m really really hot #celebrityconstruct”

— Essena ONeil

Regardless, seeing this Insta-star-turned crusader-for-truth is important.

What we see: two glasses of red wine on a table, maybe there's a little white votive there. And you read: dinner with friends xo (glass emoji).

What you don't hear is that the two of you sat trying to figure out why your libido is basically gone, why your grief is taking too fucking long already, how you're struggling to pay your health insurance, how you don't know if you're living in the right city or if you're just crazy, ungrateful or spoiled.

The fact is that sometimes social media can help us understand each other, connect, inspire each other and to dialogue - shout, reverberate and demand - about the injustice and wounds of this world.

Me. What do you see? What don't you know?

But the #SwipeGeneration is both the root and the cause of its own sadness. It's not naive to say we've learned how to amplify our own dissociation and discontent. Life is hard, thought, right? It was hard before iPhones and emojis and trending discussions. It was probably harder. But right now, for anyone with a smart phone, life consists of something deeper than ennui, disappointment and disillusionment. That something, undefinable.

But the quiet pain gets worse, because the broadcast of falseness and glamour is constant; it's the friend by your side, constantly by your side, looking gorgeous and perfect and skinny and smart and on vacation and with other friends who are probably prettier and richer and more interesting than little old you. And they went to Ibiza. And they wear things by designers you've never heard of.

You, who are trying to just make it through a day at work, through 3 hour commutes, through the phone call with your sick mother. You, who posts a selfie at the end of it all in your new green glittering dress because for a moment you feel really alive, and what the hell, you look good, and sometimes it's all just for a memory - a moment, and not a lie.

But no one knows the difference.

And when we are caught in the web of sparkly stories, we start to wonder if life itself in an illusion, thus causing that sadness to fester not only because we don't have Instagram-worthy lives or bodies, but because - what the fuck? - we can't even determine if we're in a real world anymore. We might even know it's not the truth, but isn't that worse? It's like saying, "hello robot!" to your neighbor, and then stepping back to think for second: "wait, where is your flesh?" It never dawned on you. It never meant much. But you miss it. The fragrance of livelihood.

In photos - that girl, and that guy, and that family - where are your cracks? Are you sad about your cracks? Why don't you show them? Are you ok?

I don't have an answer. But this conversation is necessary and, likely, the first of many for the next few years.

Because since the advent of digital community, we're only now slipping into the post-novelty era, when we look down at the blood on our hands and think, "it was fun while it lasted, but what or who did I kill?"

Never did I think this would be shared so globally. I have so much I want to say and talk about. Thank you to all these media outlets for helping start this discussion. I am so so so grateful. I'm crying because I needed to hear this when I was younger, heck anyone who spends hours and hours on a screen wishing they could have a 'perfect' life, this is for you. There is nothing cool about spending all your time taking edited pictures of yourself to prove to the world 'you are enough'. Don't let numbers define you. Don't let anyone tell you you're not enough without excessive makeup, latest trends, 100+ likes on a photo, 'a bikini body', thigh gap, long blonde hair. I was born into the flesh I have, there is nothing inspirational about that. I am just so grateful to think of how many young men and women might see this movement and stop limiting themselves to artificial ideas of happiness online. When you stop comparing and viewing yourself against others, you start to see your own spark and individuality. Everyone has love, kindness, creativity, passion and purpose. Don't let anyone sell you something different.

BY LIZ VON KLEMPERER

To love someone is to want to give them your body. To love someone is to want to be given their body.

No one illustrates this point more grotesquely and tenderly than The Victorians, who bundled the hair of their lovers and wove it into jewelry. Men, for example, often braided their lovers’ hair to secure watches to their wrists. Women adorned themselves with coiled wisps in glass lockets. These would be worn on low hanging chains, allowing them to rest right over the heart. Hair jewelry, as it is commonly called, was a display of affection and devotion to both living and deceased lovers. Mourners incorporated these strands of the dead into black material such as jet, or more inexpensively, vulcanite (a hardened rubber) and bog oak.

This practice offers a variant spin on our current conception of the phrase “to have” someone. The Victorians claimed ownership over the bodies of their beloveds by transforming them into ornament. Not only was this ownership asserted very visually and concretely to others, it also symbolized a triumph over the inevitable: estrangement, death. Everyone knows that hair is dead from the moment it becomes visible on the scalp, but even so, The Victorians so delicately curated these lustrous and dead clumps to symbolize vivacity, sexuality, and the eternal.

Soon after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, however, hair jewelry became less trendy. People could now carry flattened, shrunken images of their loved ones. By the mid 1840’s, the middle of The Victorian era, the daguerreotype was made relatively accessible and affordable to the public.

The slow shudder speed, however, forced subjects to sit still for uncomfortably long periods of time. Thus, the daguerreotype was initially used to memorialize the dead, who had no qualms sitting without blinking for over a minute. Photographers concocted methods of propping up corpses or shrouding them in blankets to make it appear that they were leaning on a sofa or merely resting. Mothers could carry the black and white image of their deceased children with healthy rouge superimposed on their cheeks. In this way we got closer to our ultimate desire to possess the people we love, to own them in a constant, albeit fabricated, state, to lessen the sting of death and departure. Desire shape-shifted into a new era.

A century goes by. Our preoccupations morph but never evolve. Tonight, I fall asleep cradling my phone, which contains thousands of images of my former lovers. Now they are ghosts, swirling under a blackened glass frame. Sometimes the ghosts talk to me. Not to me, exactly, but at me. Your ex lover is 5 miles away from you now, my machine chirps. There she is now, for 6 seconds only, an apparition, a puff of smoke. Tonight, I am fed this video: she is smiling garishly against the flash before tilting her device upwards to capture the sea of revelers behind her. The scene ends abruptly as someone utters her name, and I am in the dark again. I know that my machine gains nutrients from the outlet it is plugged into, and that comforts me.

We’ve worked for centuries to keep the dead alive, and now they are, almost. The frame updates. Mechanisms work silently inside, allowing us to see those who have departed us laugh, drink, and stare with an agonizing adoration at a face that is not our own.

In the continuing lineage of desire, we have become the designers and facilitators of our own haunting. And everyone knows the secret to a good haunting is to make the mind play tricks on itself. Now instead of the illusion of eternal life, we have fabricated the illusion of eternal closeness. Death is not solely the passing of the body but also a severance of ties. We are haunted by the living dead, by the people who have vanished from our daily lives but not from our consciousness. In my desire to possess my beloved, I know where she drank coffee this morning. I have read the article she skimmed on her lunch break.

I try to put away this vehicle of my own haunting. I try not to carry it to bed. Still, it feels as though I am relishing the image of a corpse as I go to refresh my newsfeed on some park bench during my lunch break. It is noon, and I am drowsy, hungry, and seeking the comfort of a screen that contains all my bright and illuminated dead behind it.

Liz Von Klemperer is the author of the unpublished novel "Human Eclipse." She also writes for Art Report, and has work forthcoming in Autostraddle. When she's not writing or tweeting at @lvonklemp, she coordinates events at The Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn.