No, I did not mean “What Your Cracked iPhone Screen Says About You.” That would be an interesting piece, though, because an iPhone screen can crack in a literally infinite number of ways. I’m sure that the pattern of your iPhone screen crack does say something about your horoscope, or your balanced chi, or how the next fifty years of your life will play out. That’s great and cool and fine. What I’m really concerned about, though, is what the act of cracking your iPhone screen says about you — you and all of your horoscopes, how your moons are aligned, how old you’re going to be when you get married, how much of a tight-ass you are, blah blah blah — because I just cracked mine, and I feel like I may have, in fact, discovered a part of my self I never knew before.
I am a lucky person in all of the ways that no one ever cares about being lucky. Whenever I take a chunk of blank notecards with me to the library, it always works out that I’ve somehow taken the exact amount I need. Or whenever something happens to me that would make a normal person really late, I always end up walking in right on time. And if I am late, then whatever I’m late for miraculously starts late, too, so that I’m relatively right on time! This luck transfers itself onto my iPhone’s durability. I am a total klutz. Dropping my iPhone is about as common an occurrence for me as going to the bathroom is for most people. (I go to the bathroom more than most people probably do, so I can’t compare my iPhone dropping tendencies to my own bathroom schedule.)
However, my iPhone never cracks. It’s only cracked once, when my mom dropped a ceramic plate on it. I don’t really know how that happens — a ceramic plate being dropped on an iPhone — but it definitely did, and my iPhone screen subsequently shattered.
So while my iPhone screen has been cracked, I have never been the cracker of it. That is, until now.
Yesterday I was walking and I was carrying a LOT. And I couldn’t put my phone in my pocket because my pockets were stuffed with those little packets of jelly and butter (don’t ask) so my phone was underneath all of the shit I was holding. When I went to grab my wallet, which was somewhere near my phone, my phone took a face plant to the ground. A face plant.
I knew it before I saw it. I felt it burning in the fiery embers of my soul. When I bent down to pick up my phone, I was confronted with all of my greatest fears. I, for the first time, had cracked my own phone.
I kind of started to cry. Actually, that’s a lie. I laughed in shock at what had happened, but felt my insides wilt like a really sad flower. My external happiness quickly gave in to the bad vibes perpetrating from within. One of my hands was shaking — the other one wasn’t, I don’t know why — and I felt as if I had just come out of a near-death experience. I felt like I lost complete control over my emotions; on one hand, I knew that shattering my iPhone wasn’t the end of the world. But on the other, I felt the desperate inclination to be melancholy, ashamed, and disappointed in myself.
We have layers of feelings going on here: we have external shock/giggling at my clumsiness, then the internal disappointment at the physical damage, and then a final, outer layer of recognition and self-satisfaction at my natural inclination to be sad. Bear with me.
I was happy about feeling sad. Feeling sad didn’t mean, in that moment, that I was upset at the unaesthetic piece of technology in my hands that Steve Jobs spent so much time and effort aestheticizing. I was sad because I felt stupid for not taking care of something that’s worth… something. Although it sounds completely trivial, I felt like an adult for realizing that there will come a point in your life when you’re standing there in slippers, sweatpants, a sherpa jacket, with butter and jam in your pockets, and something bad happens to you, and you look around and realize you’re completely alone. Here, there is no one you can turn to and say “Fuck!” You don’t realize how much you do or do not rely on The Person You Say “Fuck” To until that person isn’t there.
In conclusion, here is what cracking your iPhone screen says about you: If you survive without The Person, then you’re on your way to becoming an adult. And for a hot second there, I felt like I was on my way.
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