All This Life

To think that he had to beg his scrawny roster of followers for involvement in the immediate aftermath, tweeting things like, Don’t forget to RT my disappearance.

Which was desperate. He knew that.

But he had to work with what he had. No retweets meant his disappearance had not gone viral. Which left Jake feeling sad, alone. He so badly wanted not to be alone. He had reached that status on YouTube as a disaster shepherd, but his personal brand hadn’t garnered any hype. He knew this was no time to mope, though. Not after leaving his father and the therapist behind that door. Not after striking out on his own. No moping, Jake, he told himself, wishing he could simply Photoshop his feelings, take the melancholy and anger and alter them, write over them, hide these feelings behind something. Drop a jpeg of, say, a spruce tree with a smiling face carved in its bark.

What he’s currently experiencing is called nerves. Or being nervous. Or being noosed by nervous energy. If this were a Wikipedia page, Jake would be a perfect example of this state.

It’s all because of his new status. TheGreatJake has left the pathetic ballpark of under-1,000 Twitter followers. He had briefly found himself under the jurisdiction of five figures of followers, and now he’s breathing hallowed air, with the ballers and players and pioneers.

That word pioneer inspires Jake to do a YouTube search for the first moon walk, the lunar landing, because he feels a kinship with anyone strong enough to leave the old world. He watches Neil Armstrong walk with his flying strides, moon dust propelling up from his crunching boots. Jake wonders how the astronaut chose a direction to walk, since all directions were unexplored and unmarked and free from anybody telling him what to do or think or feel.

The terrible thing is that his battery will die soon. No iPhone means no access, no connection. It means staggering through his pristine freedom uninformed and absent. Sneaking to either his father’s or mother’s home to get a charger is too risky. If that astronaut on the moon lost his signal with the people back on earth, he’d have been in the same situation. Disoriented and doomed to die alone.

A car honks — audio going by with a Doppler slide. Pitch plummeting. Is that what it would sound like blowing a clarinet from the Golden Gate all the way down to the ocean?

He is off the grid. That’s key to being a runaway. Not leaving a footprint. He can’t use his check card or any of that, unless he wants cops surrounding him at the ATM. Hollywood has trained him how to effectively disappear.

Where he spent last night can be categorized as a park. Where he slept was a playground. He hid in a little clubhouse for the kids, sleeping on the wooden floor, and it might seem like such accommodations would be rough, but not if they indicate progress. Neil Armstrong probably wasn’t very comfortable in his rocket before his moonwalk and that didn’t stop him. There was no quit in him and there’s none in Jake. It would be like forgetting your space helmet back home. You can’t let these minor interferences keep you from striking out on your own in the hopes of something better.

Jake decides he has an hour of juice left before the phone gives out. He has $19 in his pocket, not enough to score a new charger, he guesses. He can make it to an Apple Store before his phone gives out entirely. He can steal a new charger.

One small step to an Apple Store, one giant leap for Jake-kind.

Next post: This is how you live-tweet a crime spree.

HE’S TURNED OFF all applications except Twitter. Down to 6 percent on his battery. Good for one more message.

Next live-tweet: Will I get caught when I swipe it? Stay tuned. . #BetterThanTelevision.

Hashtags are like emotions that people can see.

It is 12:27 PM. He’s been a runaway since yesterday at approximately 9:54 AM. He will use it as a commemoration: forever celebrating 9:54 as the time he changed his life.

He powers down his phone, which doesn’t happen that often. See: ever. Jake always has his iPhone armed, his e-security-blanket. He checks texts and email and Twitter and Reddit compulsively, scrolling through new comments on his disaster. Checking for any new porn clips — and there are always new porn clips!