KEEP PLANNING – Sarp Sozdinler

For several weeks after the video began circulating online, she could not decide whether she knew the woman in it from somewhere. Or whether the woman from the video was, in fact, none other than herself. The clip was only fourteen seconds long and passed from one account to another with captions of varying lengths that changed the moral emphasis of the footage with each new reshare. In one version it was presented as evidence of urban collapse, and in another as proof of the continuing human capacity for tenderness. For most, it was simply something unbelievable to witness on a Tuesday afternoon on a Sweetgreen parking lot. Some accused the woman of animal cruelty. The video showed a likeness of her, a woman who’s approximately her age and who had her face, her build, her makeup, her sweater, standing beside a red Toyota Corolla that resembled her father’s to a startling degree, while three multiracial young men in store uniforms helped her, with utmost seriousness, coax a large white bird, perhaps a goose or stray swan, into the open trunk of the car. Behind them, someone was heard crying. Or laughing. The sound was difficult to parse. She watched the clip half a dozen times since the first night a male friend sent it to her. dat u? the friend had asked, but she didn’t reply. The camera was never still and the woman’s face was never fully turned toward the viewer, which made it extra difficult for her to make sure. Still, there was something in the way the woman’s shoulders moved, the dark blur of her haircut, her exhausted-not-yet-defeated body language, that troubled her. She couldn’t decide whether she was more afraid to recognize herself in the woman from the video than for other people to identify who she was. And how come she had no memory of this event, if it was really her? Was she perhaps that drunk, a new low even by her standards? At the time the clip was recorded, or at least released to the public, she was going through a rough patch in which she’d been sleeping badly, subsisting mostly on the packaged noodles at her desk, and working for a nonprofit on digital equity day and night. By day she composed elegantly phrased essays on governmental policies on newfound technologies. By night she doomscrolled to eternity. She’d once imagined adulthood would offer her more gratifying moments and contain some kind of hardening agent that would give her passage in this world a clearer shape. Instead, she often experienced life by the very interface of the digital medium through which she viewed other people’s humiliations, tragedies, proposals, diagnoses, skin routines, and at large, inner battles. What unsettled her most about this particular video was not the possibility that she might actually be the kind of woman who once tried to detain a large bird against its will, but the semi-conscious possibility that she’d already seen the video before while lying half-drunk in bed, before her friend had even sent it to her, and felt briefly for that woman the thin charitable pity one feels for strangers online before moving on to another mindless reel, another bombing elsewhere, another politically inappropriate joke. When she finally showed the clip to her mother, her mother watched it in silence, then rewatched it, only to hand the phone back to her and say, not unkindly, I don’t think that’s you, honey. But I do think that’s exactly the sort of situation you could find yourself in. For the rest of that week, her mother’s remark struck her as either an insult or the closest anyone had yet come to summarizing her life. Either way, it changed everything for her. Following the incident with her mother, she began to review the minor evidence of her Self that had been accumulating online over the past couple of decades: the heavily retouched office photo on Facebook, in which she appeared to be smiling perhaps a bit too enthusiastically; the tagged birthday picture where she seemed, even while smiling, even among friends and family, to be bracing herself for some kind of impending disaster; the grocery receipt in her coat pocket that listed a miscellany of crackers, cold medicine, canned beans, canned chickpeas, canned rice, canned everything, pretty much the itinerary of a priest or a diehard survivalist. None of these, she considered, felt significant, nor amounted to a formidable sense of Self in the end. At least not to a rich, deeper understanding of the term. Yet taken together they suggested a Woman who moved through life in a constant state of near-disaster, or who was forever on the path to some bleak destiny. It only took one or two more weeks for the video to vanish completely from her feeds that seemed to be rotating at an incredible speed, overtaken by election coverage, floods in southern Spain, an actor getting blacklisted after his very public comments on abortion, and a journalist explaining the reasons behind the collapse of an authoritarian regime from inside his sedan. She could not deny, in the back of her mind, the class implications of herself, or a version of herself, trying with utmost seriousness to push a wild animal into her vehicle while three potentially underpaid boys assisted her on some recent evening she could not account for. Moreover, the bird’s fate remained unknown. She checked her fridge and felt bad for the evenly cut pieces of chicken breast sitting idly on the top shelf. She wondered if the bird from the video somehow ended up on someone’s plate, or worse, her own, against her knowledge. She could not do such a thing. She loved animals. She cared for all sentient beings, at least to the best of her abilities. The more days passed by, the less and less likely it seemed to her that she and the woman in the video were one and the same, more so now that the video had completely disappeared from her life and she didn’t have to think about it anymore. Still, when, weeks later, she finally deleted the clip from her phone too, she felt not relief but, to her surprise, something close to bereavement, as though by removing the last digital traces of that person in the video—that other version of her non-Self—she had also dismissed from her life the one witness who could bear the gravity of her non-being. Perhaps that was also why, as soon as she opened her eyes the next morning, she felt for the first time the absence of another presence in the same room with her, as though a veil, or a weight of some kind, were lifted off her reality, some exhausted public double, or a second shadow, who had secretly borne the burden of being alive and enjoyed, however briefly, the strain of being seen.

*** Sarp Sozdinler is a writer from Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His work has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region. 21 May 2026