I first experienced the pitfall of a slow reply with my boyfriend D. We were thirteen. After seventh period let out and we went home for the evening, we would text all night on our pre-iPhones. Mine was a…
You might be tired of hearing about me and my phone, but there is one more detail that I must tell you. There’s this app I use. It’s called How We Feel, where you essentially just check in a few times a day, selecting what emotion you’re feeling, where you’re at, who you’re with, and what you’re doing. At the end of the week, the HWF algorithms prepare for you a weekly review. You felt Happy in the mornings, Spent in the evenings, Irritated twice, Nostalgic a lot, Grateful after stretching. I’m always trying to push this app onto my friends, saying, Look, it’s not therapy, but it’s like therapy, and it’s free. Do you know how cheap free is?
Usually when I write a nonfiction piece, I am working my way towards a memory or trying to parse out an idea. I ask myself, Why is this memory glimmering in my mind? Who or what is generating the light? Or, Can I untangle this ball of yarn, even just slightly? But more than most any other essay I’ve written, what drove this piece was a particular feeling. The feeling is anxiety buzzing inside my chest and heavy wings on my back, tightening my body into itself. The feeling is not daily, but it is constant, waiting for me at any moment because it is tied to my phone. I know this because I can remember a time before the feeling and I met.
When preparing for this essay, that emotion arose inside me. I wrote this essay longhand, using multicolored pens, in a single morning. I was trying to remove the tension I was feeling from my body. I wanted to wrangle it onto the page—push it away from me. The feeling still arises inside me when I read this piece, so I would not say it’s been excised from me, but something new did happen in the process. Once I finished the piece, I saw the feeling for what it is. I was able to name it on the page, the same way I name my emotions when checking in on my app. And I realized, surely, that this feeling must belong to more people than just me.
That’s how I knew I had done what was needed of me.
Having said this, I frequently crave more specific, nuts-and-bolts discussions of nonfiction craft. I am interested in the embodied particularities that feel nonfiction-centric (at least, to me). So much of this work happens instinctually, yet, when I look back, I can usually trace my body’s thinking.
This was my body’s thinking. While writing this piece, I felt as if I were having a difficult time breathing, the way a person underwater might. I knew danger would materialize and the stakes would rise organically. My first surprise came when I compared my flip phone to a clamshell, summoning the beach. Patterns aligned until I arrived at that moment where my texts became messages in a bottle. What does a message in a bottle indicate? Distress, yearning for communication, and a means of wishful thinking. There it was—my guiding metaphor.
The rattlesnake dusk of my hometown lent itself to those Devil cliffs opening up beneath me. I am a fan of choosing one or two metaphors and letting them grow on their own. When D breaks up with me, I compare love to a hose out of water in this desert-world. But what about that beach I had already set up? What is the water—safety, or danger? This is where layers emerge. This is how meaning presses up against itself, complicating into friction, showing me what I am trying to pull apart.
There is a brilliant alchemy that happens inside the right metaphors, even if they are conflicting ones. What you are trying to say, how you are trying to say it, and why it matters can bloom there.
When I write, the wisdom usually arrives inside the craft before it arrives inside of me.
For this essay in particular, moving through time with efficiency felt like the only way to convey the emotional truth inside me. I knew that telling a Cell Phone Story could easily fall flat. That’s why my subconscious turned to these landscaped metaphors to begin with—to give me and the reader a common plane to return to outside of the cell phones. A place to quickly orient ourselves before materializing more emotion.
The irony of this story, of course, is that the real living—the feeling—happens outside of the haunted phone. That logic became baked into my metaphors before I was even awake to what I was trying to say. In order to tell you how I felt, I had to expand my world beyond the phone, which is the very conclusion the essay ends up reaching toward by the time we arrive back on that clamshell beach.
This is how a feeling becomes a story: by following those small surprises into the light.
CIARA ALFARO is a Chicana writer from Lubbock, Texas. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, swamp pink, Passages North, Southeast Review, Witness, and more. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and her BA from Colgate University, where she served as a 2024-25 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow. She currently teaches at the University of Minnesota. Find her on Instagram @ciaraalfaro.
