Lyric Essay – Jill Szoo Wilson

There is a version of you
already walking around out there.

She has good lighting.
He is a series of clean paragraphs.
They speak in sentences that arrive
fully dressed.

No one interrupts them.
No one misquotes them.
No one catches the moment
before the thought lands.

They do not hesitate.
They do not circle back.
They do not say,
“Wait, that’s not what I meant.”

This version of you
does not exist in your kitchen
or your car
or the quiet ten minutes
before sleep.

Still, she is convincing.

She has been liked.
Shared.
Saved for later
by people who will not remember
where they found her.

Meanwhile,

you forget what you were saying
mid-sentence.
You start projects you never return to.
You carry conversations in your body
long after they’ve ended.

You revise yourself
in the shower.
You win arguments
three days late.

There is no algorithm for that.

No one clicks
on the unfinished version.
No one bookmarks
the moment you changed your mind
and did not announce it.

And yet,

this is the only place
anything real has ever happened.

Not in the caption,
but in the pause before it.
Not in the post,
but in the hour you spent
deciding whether to speak at all.

The Internet will continue
to assemble you
from fragments.

A sentence here.
A photograph there.
A tone someone will misunderstand
and carry with them
as if it were complete.

You will be summarized
by people who have never
heard your voice in a room.

You will be known
in ways that are technically accurate
and entirely untrue.

This is not a problem
to be solved.

It is a condition.

So—

wash your cup.
answer the email you’ve been avoiding.
tell the truth
in the next small conversation
that asks it of you.

Let your life become
slightly more aligned
with the person
who appears so effortlessly
on a screen.

Not perfectly.
Not all at once.

Just enough
that if someone were to meet you
without context,
without history,
without the archive—

they would recognize you.

And if they didn’t,
you would not feel the need
to explain.

Now,

go and become the person
you want the Internet to think you are.

“You can observe a lot
just by watching,”
said a baseball player
who understood seasons.

Two afternoons ago,
I sat in a lecture hall
watching a man
who still loves what he does.

This, I think, is a form of generosity.

He spoke about observation
as though it were not a skill
but a posture,
something you lean into
rather than master.

Take the dandelion.

We learned its name early.
We learned it could grant wishes
if we breathed hard enough.
We learned the wind would do the rest.

Then we decided
we knew it.

Label applied.
Lesson complete.
Attention withdrawn.

The dandelion continued anyway
with its architecture,
its patience,
its quiet mathematics of return.

It kept unfolding relationships
with bees,
with soil,
with children who forgot its name
but still loved its defiance.

How many things
have we learned only enough
to stop looking?

How many people
do we greet by name
while knowing nothing
of their design?

Later, we were encouraged
to ask our questions
and then to set them down.

To watch.

Intellectual beauty likes to be solved.
Aesthetic beauty prefers to be witnessed.

One explains.
The other arrives.

So perhaps today
we step outside
without extracting meaning.

No schedules.
No proof.

Just a willingness
to stand still
long enough
for something ordinary
to show itself
as extraordinary.

And if we feel something
we cannot name,
let us resist the urge
to name it.

Let us watch.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

Tag: Lyric Essay

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