"And for the 3-minute-and-52-second duration of the video" (S75)

And for the 3-minute-and-52-second duration of the video, he felt better.

The red-hot embarrassment that had been burning his flesh from his cheeks down through his fingers and toes faded away, as did the intense shame that felt like a gut punch to his soul and made him want to throw up until there was nothing left of him. Why did I have to post that? He wrestled with himself. He hadn’t really meant what he wrote on X, but now it was all he would be remembered for. The voice of his mother rang in his ears. ‘It will all blow over in a few days. Don’t worry. I’ll pray for you.’ He scoffed again remembering it. What will that do? What does she know? The messages of vitriolic backlash kept coming.

‘You are nothing,’ the voice from his phone called out. ‘Remember this. You are nothing, you are nothing, you are nothing.’ It caught him off guard. Its uncanny strangeness yet familiarity resonated with some deeper truth he was carrying in his soul, like the strike of a mallet on a singing bowl. He entered through his heart to a place prior to propositions, full of knowing. He felt for a moment calm. Free. At peace. The voice carried on, extolling the virtues of non-attachment, the insignificant way each human being measures up to the scale of cosmic space and time. The video began to loop over and over again as Jesse’s mind wandered, the deep truth of the initial statement ‘you are nothing’ swirling around in his head, along with a thousand other thoughts, simultaneously firing off, and he tried to piece them together. ‘I am nothing… nothing matters, no one matters, what I do doesn’t matter…’ Without any guidance or discussion, he settled in his mind on a poorer version of the original feeling he had, an escapism imitating transcendence. ‘What I did doesn’t matter,’ he tried to reassure himself.

Satisfied with this, and lacking the attention span to deepen it any further, he flicked his thumb to the next video. 'But it does matter,' his stomach and cheeks fought back, as the shame and embarrassment crept back and reminded him he hadn’t really escaped. Jesse tried to ignore it and kept scrolling through more videos, acquiescing to the numbness that followed.

Eventually he sat up, put his phone down once again, and dropped his face into his emptied hands, waiting for the maelstrom of thoughts and feelings to pass. It was too much. Too much for one person to integrate alone.