The moment she clicked Sign Up, her life changed forever. Social media was only a distant dream to a typical, young, eleven year old girl. This girl, however, grasped access to technology that not many other girls her age had the desire or fortune to handle. It was an overwhelming feeling, having this large, metal object placed into her dainty palms at such an early age, but her parents had both the money and trust to give this girl everything she could ever imagine wanting.
     Her pale eyes held, unwavering at the screen. The advancement of technology amazed her how she could type in a word and thousands of results popped up instantly! She searched her favorite music artists, discovered shows and movies, read books, and made new friends. Fast-paced games tested her intelligence while slow tempo rhythms relaxed her mind. She signed up for many sites, all beginning with a slow start but quickly she got accustomed to the layouts and controls of them all. From this magical place, the Internet, she discovered many fascinating sites that took hold her imagination and whisked it away into the cloud of .coms.
     The girl began losing sleep. She would wake up tired and eager to log back on to her profiles, all containing that of which she held on to as her connection to the outside world. Her friends at school were never interested to go to her house, all the girl would do is sit in front of the screen. I don’t need friends, she would think, repressing the building loneliness by searching through more images.
     The chirping of the birds outside drifted slowly to silence as winter loomed over the horizon. The quiet was filled by a whirring of a computer in the girl’s room. Lights seldom graced the cold walls in the place where she resided, her childhood remnants remained untouched, scattered unorderly around the room as she remained glued to her computer. The girl thinned, her body stopped growing, and she never opened her door, excluding to consume a single meal and close herself in again. Before long, her body would succumb to the natural process of decay.
     A year had passed since she’d received the present which she now mentally plugged herself into every day. Her parents became increasingly concerned as the months passed and no word had escaped her lips, nor had her eyes faced toward anything but the floor and screen. No amount of coaxing could convince the girl to shut down. No amount of force could relieve the girl of her internet addiction. She would become irritable, sometimes violent, towards others that dwelled upon her state, lashing out by kicking and screaming until they had left her alone. Sometimes the girl’s consciousness would wake and she would hear her mother’s sobbing outside her door or a whistle of wind through the trees outside her window, but soon that coherent side of her was overcome by the tidal wave of web surfing yet again.
     The girl, unsurprisingly, sat alone in her room the last night she logged on. A chill went through her, raising the hair on her neck and arms. Her mind, for a fraction of a second, slipped out of her intensity and gazed at the world around her. She reminisced on her life before the internet, almost smiling as she remembered riding bikes with her friends and attending school every week day. That moment was gone with the blink of an eye, and her thoughts reverted back to the narrow-mindedness she had been engulfed with for the past year and a half. That little girl wouldn’t come back out of her head or of her room until she had gone out with her boots on. The veins in her eyes had begun to emerge, slowly but consistently, as her gaze held to the white blur directly in front of her. Hundreds upon hundreds of pictures appeared but left as quickly as they had come. I don’t need sleep, she told herself as she willed her finger to perform a function other than scroll incessantly. Logic had been pushed to the deep, dark crevices of the girl’s head by the mind-numbing lull of technology, leaving her frail body a shell to wander the depths of the web without cease. The pleading voice in her head faded slowly behind the wall of internet affairs as realization struck her; she would be spending the next lifetime on social media. She had lost control and, ultimately, had lost herself.