#Hashtag

I didn’t know what a hashtag was four years ago, but today, it seems to be completely integrated into daily colloquialism for people under the age of 30 — a natural afterthought to a sentence, or a full sentence itself.

“Thank god it’s Friday #yolo #yas”

“Thank you for the great advice. I don’t know what I would do without you. #besties”

“#womancrushwednesday”

Hashtag is the language of texting, of tweeting, of instagramming, of only living once. Hashtags group together thoughts and trends in online spaces. Spoken out loud, the word “hashtag” can add humor to the content of the accompanying message. It is not, however, the language of love. That language lives in the novels I grew up devouring. I have always been a sucker for a good romance, the kind of love story that asks you to root for the lovers regardless of how irrational, selfish, and destructive they are: Florentino Ariza’s life-long infatuation with Fermina Daza, Newland Archer’s hopeless desire for Countess Olenska, Amory Blaine’s whirlwind obsession with his beloved Rosalind. Sipping on the monologues and exchanges between those characters, I get tipsy with desire for a life reflective of their passion. The words they use to communicate love are almost as beautiful as the constructs those words evoke, and it is that language that I use to structure the storyline of my own romances.

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“Abstraction — Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn’t you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren’t yours. It’s not as if I can conjure you there completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.” — David Levithan

When he traveled during the week, I would cuddle the pillow that still held his scent and embrace a figment of my heart’s imagination. When I traveled, I saw him come to life in every marketplace, every show, every mountain and valley. There was always some inside joke or memory that could conjure him, even in a tropical jungle half-way across the world.

“You say that you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s an insult to me. I know about you.” — John Greene

He had these dragons that he couldn’t slay, but never wanted to admit that they were worthy of attention, or that even if he was not the only person with problems, his problems were no less significant. I tried to show him that in my world, he mattered in very tangible ways, but I was never good enough to cover up the large gaping hole of ambition and drive he had to fight against the inevitability of being just another human to have lived and walked on this earth.

“He turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate” — Edith Wharton

When we parted ways, there were a million things I wanted to say to him. There were a million words I wanted to speak to express how much I missed him, how much I loved the little things about us, like how his body made just the right amount of space for mine to curl up against, or how his carefree attitude dared me to part with my meticulously controlled ways. What came out instead was, more often than not, a gargle of angry words, a string of incoherent desperate pleas or a few occasional sarcastic back-handed slaps. And then there were no more words — until this afternoon.

Because I couldn’t forget him, I offered an olive branch to start a conversation. What I received in response to a few benign teases was a hashtag.

#shutyourwhoremouth

The passion I had held on for months after whatever “we” were no longer existed died with those words placed back to back after a # sign. All of the abstraction, self-made romantic endings, idolized imagery of love dried up with that hashtag. Did he mean to be funny? Did he mean to be sassy? Did he mean to be offensive? Did it matter? He verbally abused me under the guise of a trend, and I can accuse but never prove his disrespect, as the presence of the # conceals his true meaning and thus absolves him from blame.

Hashtag is not the language of love. It’s the language of those whose lives online and offline are so fluid, even syntax flows freely between those two mediums. It’s the language of a generation of people who have lost the art of eloquence and for whom romance has been reduced to the regularity and velocity of an anticipated text message. Give me discrete words, separated by carefully placed spaces and punctuations! Give me thoughts methodically transformed into vowels and consonants. Give me something better than crude disrespect disguised as humor, placed after a symbol that acts as a clef mark to indicate the banal pitch of what’s to come.

My whore mouth speaks words and my whorish ears crave words, especially those arranged in true sentences to evoke fantastical promises of love.