Power

Anise and I foundered upon the shores of our secret power by accident. It was like walking on the edge of the sea in the dark. You could hear the roiling waves grumbling and fizzling out on your feet, the quick saltwater licking your feet cold and sandy, the smell of brine reaching your nose, without having seen the greenish brackish water capped angrily with foam. Because there is no light, the only way to be certain that it is there is to walk toward the noise and wade into the midst of it.

Most would have walked away afraid that they might drown underneath the weight and power.

But Anise and I, we had felt that we had very little to lose, being that she and I were hormonal teenagers and we tried discovering our own rituals separate and apart from the boring rituals of our parents, of waking in the morning to go to a stressful job and then return home playing a game of avoidance with your spouse and kids before going back to bed. But how do you find such rituals when your neighbors, and your neighbors' neighbors, all partook in this set of domestic customs, as replete with drudgery as it was?

Simply, through the internet.

And who had given us access to the internet, the well of sorts of knowledge, both innocuous and virulent? None other than our own fathers and mothers. In a collective consciously motivated act, Anise's parents and my own placed into our hands the means of doing the devil's work, a pair of smart phones with the impotent command that the phones were to be used only in the case of emergencies. They thought that they had figured out how to rein in our fierce teenage selfishness by limiting the number of minutes allowed by our smartphones, by monitoring our cell phone usage through rough and ungainly apps sold to them by the phone's service provider and by reviewing the phone bill each month.

But, as time progresses, the sophistication of knowledge progresses, too. The young build upon the knowledge of the old, as if each fact discovered and learned by the prior generation, becomes a part of the gene pool, passed along to the younger generation. Our parents had grown up with personal computers centralized in one room, with boxy computer screens and roaring hard drives. Electronic information was held in a kiddie pool and its users used blow-up floatees to keep from drowning in the shallows. But our generation had dug out an ocean of information, deep and wide for us to swim in, and, we all swam in.

"Rob," she said. She often said my name allowed as if trying to take ownership over it, and, by extension, me.

The hot coffee pour into my mouth and down the back of my throat.