She sat on the floor alone in the dark room and watched a world unfold before her eyes only a foot away from the glowing television screen.
The air was stale and dry. The low hum of electricity that could only be noticed by virgin ears penetrated into her mind unknowingly. A low grad headache would appear only when she turned the television set off to go to sleep.
Sometimes she left the TV on to avoid the effects of withdrawal. Static breathing quietly beside her sleeping body on the couch, as if someone else was there to comfort and hold her throughout the night.
She would wake with endless discomfort, and spend the first parts of her mornings doing all she could to restore her body to some sort of equilibrium. Make coffee, splash her face with cold water. Have her first cigarette of the day with the coffee like a ritual. Ponder all the things she had to do. Spend more time thinking about it then actually doing any of it.
Then, when the minute came for the thoughts to start racing and become too much, the glowing box would begin to call her name. It would begin singing that sweet song of temptation, crying out "don't worry darling, I'll help ease the pain.".
When she pressed the power button the brightness began to fade in from black, brighter than ever before, like pulling back the curtains on a sunny day in winter. A reminder that the sun is still there, underneath the clouds, behind the long, cold, dark evenings.
There she watched life occur in endless plots and characters. Spaghetti Westerns, Sitcoms, Psychological Thrillers, Slashers. It was there she learned to feel joy, sadness, empathy, regret.
She once used to be a radiant and imaginative little girl, drawing and telling stories beside her entertaining little TV. Her dream was to tell her stories. Tell stories beyond bedtime with mother. Beyond playful fantasies that only existed in her internal world. She wanted to tell stories and have them be heard on the screen. On the screen where she could make it out of her head, and into the world.
The more life that was being taken from the girl at the hands of time, the more life played out before her on the silver screen. The TV takes light, power, energy. But every day she kept it plugged in. She left it on even if there was no signal picking up. Her apartment cluttered with discs and tangled cords. She sat on her knees so often before the screen. The floor beneath her, as if it were a bench for prayer.
Sappy love stories, recordings of natural disasters, car crashes. Pornography, torture. She would not eat for days. Sacrifice jobs, relationships. Hold in her Blatter until it became painful. She was just an imperfect human, stood face to face with the television set, where worlds opened to her, for which she could enter at any second with leisure.
But the world was no longer there like how it was when she was little. That little TV changed. Coaxial became RCA became HDMI. The lights got brighter, and bluer. The pictures were clear like crystal. Sometimes better vision than the girl was capable of herself. It got better at hiding the pervasive, grotesque sounds of technology working. The stories the television told got more mature, more engaging, more realistic.
Not after long, there was no need for the girl to imagine things anymore. She could see them imagined for her. The TV began telling her the stories of her own life. Her dreams of making it on the screen was one story she saw over and over. There was A Star Is Born in 1937, 1954, and 1976. Of course there was also All About Eve with celluloid hero Bette Davis, there was Sunset Boulevard, just to name a few.
In fact she never did end up sharing her stories on the screen, for the world to see. Because she didn't have to. She dreamt of the TV, and of what it could conceive. Anytime she sat down to write, she wrote about the TV, it's beautiful curvature, the cool sunsets on the never ending horizons it was capable of. Her world was the TV. The TV was the world. Not just any world, but a whole new world.
There were no more stories left inside of her. There were no more stories left to tell. Besides the story of the TV.