Your intent is to antagonize?
But who are you really fighting?
A name on a screen?
A stranger you’ve never met?

You aim to wound
someone you don’t even know.
No face. No voice.
Just words.

Still
you close the app
emotionally wrecked,
tangled in a battle
with someone
who only ever wanted
to make you feel small.

Do you bring that same energy
into the world outside your Wi-Fi signal?
Do you spit that same venom
when you’re standing face-to-face?

Or does the screen give you courage
you’ve never found in your chest?

I’ll say it again:

IT’S. NOT. REAL.

And yet
somehow the pain is.

I’m amazed at the strength
people summon
to be cruel behind a keyboard.
Why is kindness
so much heavier to lift?

Was someone so cruel to you
that revenge is your only language?

Then maybe the real question isn’t
“Who are you fighting?”

Maybe it’s
“What has the internet done to us?”


I try to talk sense
to my stepdaughter
her world is stitched together
by usernames and blinking dots
across oceans,
across time zones,
across lives she’s never touched in person.

She gets mad
when she can’t reach them.
When the screen stays dark,
she feels forgotten.
I tell her:
“It’s not real, sweetheart.”

But I can see it in her eyes
it is to her.

And maybe that’s the point.
Maybe it doesn’t matter
if I don’t live in that world.
She does.
And it hurts her
just the same.

Still, I want to protect her
from anonymous cruelty,
from digital dependence,
from the weight of a heartbreak
delivered by silence in a chat box.

I want to tell her
that the people who matter
look you in the eye.
They sit beside you
in stillness,
not behind a screen
waiting for you to type faster.

But I also wonder
if I’m just too far from her world
to understand it.
And she’s too deep in it
to climb out.