Can you see me?

The invisible ex-crack smoking poet.

My poetry presentation was going very badly.

I thought about running away to live in the forest, never to be seen again.

The tech wasn’t working. Something with the webcam. I couldn’t share my screen.

And I didn’t realize it for at least five mortifying minutes. I had already made it halfway through my stupid poem — which I had read aloud at least 1,000 times the night before.

The professor had to flag me down in the chat room.

“I can’t see anything. Is your camera on?”

And the other students were having a field day.

“You may not have enough bandwidth,” one genius wrote.

“Try logging in and logging out again,” chimed in another scholar.

I already did. Three times.

“Can you see me?” I asked.

I could see all their tiny heads in windows shaking. No, no, no, no…

Where is the nearest forest, anyway?

“How about now?”

I don’t even know how to start a fire. And I don’t eat meat.

“Now?

I guess I could eat berries. But are there even berries in winter? Or would the bears have cleaned up before they hibernated?

“I don’t think this is working out,” the prof said.

We both knew she was referring to my entire existence.

Would the bears still be sleeping — or would I have to tiptoe around in the woods?

This evening — a poetry reading for about 40 university students — had been a source of gnawing anxiety for weeks.

I had already made my first presentation a couple of weeks earlier. This was a writing class though. I had to read my first ever poem. Then analyze and discuss it.

If I could make it through technical hell.

I fiddled with every webinar setting. Pushed all the buttons. I tried using my phone as its own wireless hotspot.

The class just stared at me.

“Let’s hold off on your presentation and let someone else go ahead of you,” the prof said, at last. “That will give you more time to figures it out.”

I thought I had worked out every detail. I had pages of printed notes, meticulously rehearsed. There were jokes for all ages. Analysis too.

How I practiced! And how much sleep had I lost, mouthing the words to my infernal poem in bed, over and over again.

The irony? I wrote the poem about a friend who died recently. But it was really about how technology isolates and disconnects us from society as we get older. I had become the ‘old man’ in my poem!

Okay, so let’s be real. It was much too cold outside for me to relocate to the forest. My mother would at least let me go back to smoking crack though. Surely, after this soul-crushing defeat, no one could begrudge me that.

But first, I’d have to log out of this online course, and drop the rest of my classes. The back-to-school experiment was a bust.

Quoth the crack smoker: ‘Fuck this. I’m out.’

And while I pondered, weak and weary, it came to me.

I had logged in using my personal email. Not my student email. Maybe that was it?

“I got it!” I yelled. But my mic was off. I really needed this kid to finish his presentation.

This will work. I KNOW it will work.

Hurry up kid.

Finally, the professor turned to me: “Have you got it sorted out?”

“I think so. I mean… I logged in again with my student email and I think.. well, let’s try it…”

“Can you see me?” I asked.

“Yes, we can see you.”