Letting Go

as an act of letting go, I trashed the  sixty-five inch tv me and my ex went halfsies on during the pandemic. I cancelled all the streaming subscriptions, as an act of letting go and to save money bye Paramount, bye Peacock bye Hulu! / as act of letting go I continue to transform my apartment into the post-toxic-relationship sanctuary that I  deserve / come to  realize I have an addiction to violent tv movies and shows—those morbid docu-series Netflix joints and true crime documentaries on HBO Max. I  didn't realize how much I indulged in lazy-hazy weird escapism and the addict behavior of getting sucked in unable to stop compulsively consuming morbid shit in order to know, to find out what happened, who-dunnit and to avoid the same horrible fate / true crime documentaries that nauseate as they fascinate / cold case files, unsolved mysteries, sad stories of missing and murdered women / my No-TV-land feels quiet and empty / a laptop visit to the New York State Police website provides the adrenaline rush / a shot of fear / cures the boredom / a simple search for Missing Persons / Click / Scroll / Click /  Yikes not only Missing Person postings of smiling and unsmiling faces but listings upon listings upon listings of  Human Remains Discoveries Eek / most of the pictures, if you are looking at New York State the Empire state that is, specifically Upstate, NY, most of the unsolved cases are actually MEN. Surprisingly / shocked to see —a great majority white men / Going back to the 1950s, the 70s, 80s —up until today /  to see more men though than women Hmmm. / totally expected it to be the other way around the way it is on Netflix the way they normalize women being murdered, white women that is bodies corpses carcasses left to rot. White women. Mostly. Black and Brown women, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, still ignored / a pandemic Unseen. No, most of the photos at least in this search —with facial reconstruction tech and DNA testing —result in postings of mostly white men / human remains found Upstate in swamps, leafy ditches and shallow graves / Couldn't help but think of The Sopranos. Did these men come across the wrong Good Fellas? Interesting yet far Less entertaining and much creepier to look at these digital autopsy results / a few happy endings / missing people found here and there / reckless teens / old people with Alzheimers  / so many found dead / it's the pictures of the missing children that hurt my heart the most / and most of what I see are want ads seeking information / unsolved cold cases — When it comes to true crime sifting through spooky primary sources is creepier than watching the documentaries on the sofa with my Uber eats, no dramatic pauses, no fade ins to news paper clippings, no bird eye views of small towns, no sharp cuts to interviews with investigators, and the bereaved, no eerie music, no shadowy silhouettes.  Only the soft sounds of my own home / my own heartbeat and the hiss of the heat coming out of the radiator.  The sounds of ten o'clock. The man upstairs is not angry tonight and the kids must be all tucked in. I  know, I  can always get another HD TV with same-day-delivery service and the prices have gone way down since the pandemic, and there are sales going on, especially for the Superbowl coming up and the streaming companies are offering me great deals dying for me to come back but then I wouldn't be saving money and I wouldn't be letting go