in this valley of digital graves

an eulogy of sorts

I’d just finished reading a dark and twisty thriller—The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson—and was in the market for my next read. Goodreads presented me with a few options: Maybe I was in the mood for creature horror, it being “spooky season” and all? Or perhaps I was down for the new Emily Henry romance I’d read in a day and then no doubt regret. Or maybe I could be tempted to read one of those new literary fiction novels with less than a thousand reviews, which could either be a slog to get through OR my best read of the year (or, terrifyingly, both).

I wasn’t in the mood for any of those, and then a thought popped up in my head. I wonder what Noelle’s been reading?

I’d stumbled across Noelle Gallagher’s “BookTube” channel in 2020, when my sister and I decided to race to 50 books before the end of the year as a last-ditch effort to combat the Covid blues. I quickly became a fan of Noelle’s channel, her straightforward and honest reviews of new books leading me to find some of my new favourite reads. I loved the way she curated each of her videos based on the season of the year, or how she was feeling at the time, and even loved her 24-hour book vlogs (although I’ll be at a loss to explain how watching someone else read a book can be so entertaining).

I watched Noelle’s videos less and less as the years progressed and I found my groove when it come to reading. I no longer depended on hers or anyone’s recommendations, instead building a TBR (to-be-read) list that is now so robust it’ll see me through the next five years, at least.

But yesterday, finding myself in a rut, I looked up her channel on YouTube. It was October, surely she’d have an Autumn reads video out by now.

As it turns out, Noelle Gallagher hasn’t posted a single video in the last year. Her last video was a tour of her new bookshelf—hardly the “Goodbye, YouTube” video I was expecting. The top comments were lamenting her disappearance and hoping she’d return to “BookTube”, one comment even calling her their Roman Empire.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Noelle on Instagram but couldn’t find an account. Had she deleted it? Or maybe she was never on Instagram?

I returned to her channel and watched her last video, but I couldn’t quite get into it. As she unselfconsciously showed us around her new bookshelf, and even alluded to possibly giving us a more detailed tour in the future, I wondered: Where did you go? And why?

Somewhere in Ladakh. 2021.

Cody Ko got cancelled earlier this year.

You’ll probably need me to decode that sentence for you.

Cody Ko was, until recently, a rather popular YouTuber. He would record videos of himself reacting to strange and interesting things on the internet, and once again, I find myself unable to explain why that would be funny but it is.

I began watching Cody Ko’s videos in 2022, and he quickly became a shared “bit” between my long-distance best friend and I. We’d share video links back and forth and talk about Cody like he was our third long-distance best friend. When I was in the Philippines, crippled under the weight of a kind of loneliness that was too big for me to bear, I’d stay up late watching Cody’s videos, shaking with laughter, trying my best not to wake up my roommate.

I loved Cody’s videos. Not only was he funny, but also balanced. He frequently went against the grain of the internet, defending those that others would be quick to make fun of, and he was always open to having his mind changed. He seldom, if ever, piled on to people, always choosing to be fair and compassionate. And, of course, he was a riot. Possibly the funniest person to have ever lived.

I mean, he’s still alive. He’s just also cancelled.

Right, “cancelled” is internet terminology for when someone famous has done something morally reprehensible and been found out. To cancel someone is to decide that they no longer deserve their platform, whatever that might be, or audience, whoever that might be. To cancel someone is to silence them, a swift and efficient punishment for a crime not always clearly defined.

(But, Krysanne, you might say, haven’t we ALL done morally reprehensible things and just perhaps not been found out? Which one of us can really measure up to the perfection of our divine creator and His Son, Jesus Christ? Does this mean that none of us is deserving of love and compassion? To which I’d reply, shhh, this is the Internet. It doesn’t have to make sense. But you’re right. But shush.)

Cody Ko got cancelled after being accused of having sexual relations with a minor. He was 25 and she was 17, which would have been statutory rape in the state of Florida. The accuser, his victim, spoke about the incident casually in a few different podcasts, which is how the story came out. She mentioned that she had cleared the air with Cody, and healed from the incident, but then she kept talking about it. A few internet ninjas figured out the year this might have taken place, and their respective ages, deduced that it was statutory rape, accused Cody Ko of being a rapist, and swiftly killed his YouTube career. (I know, I know. Shush.)

After discovering Noelle Gallagher’s now inactive YouTube channel, I navigated over to Cody Ko’s page. Following weeks of posting nearly daily, an overproduction in preparation for the birth of his first child, Cody hadn’t posted a single video in the past three months. The comments on his latest video were all about the allegations, delighting in his disappearance, and calling Cody Ko’s fall from grace a “YouTuber canon event.”

I didn’t have to wonder where Cody had gone: he was no doubt waiting out the social media storm, spending time with his wife and kid, and figuring out his next steps. Even then, his radio silence on social media, and the absence of even a “Bye, YouTube” post, felt eery.

Somewhere in Ladakh. 2021.

Four years ago, I lost a dear friend to suicide. It was in the same year that I attempted the NaPoWriMo challenge, where I and some other poet friends endeavoured to write one original poem every day during the month of April.

Unsurprisingly, most of my poems that year were about death. One in particular comes to mind right now, a free-verse poem I called ‘untitled (digital graves)’.¹ I wrote the poem in one sitting (it’s really rather terrible), after scrolling through the participants of our group chat one day and seeing the name of my deceased friend. You’re still here? I thought. And then: When will you leave?

I imagined her elder brother, who had posted a truly heartbreaking eulogy on Facebook the week before, going through her phone and leaving all the group chats so that it would stop pinging so much. I thought of one day waking up to the notification, Your friend, whom you loved so much, who is no more, has left the group chat. And I thought of how awful and fascinating that would be.

Somewhere in Ladakh. 2021.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, this is a newsletter about Liam Payne, the 31-year-old musician and member of now-defunct boyband One Direction, who lost his life in a freak accident on Wednesday.

You cannot even begin to imagine the way my heart broke, writing out that sentence.

I don’t think I will be able to articulate how anguished I am over Liam’s passing. I cannot truly make sense of it. But that’s not what this newsletter is about.

Over the past few days, I’ve spent a lot of time on social media, scrolling through not only Liam’s page but also the pages of Niall, Louis, Zayn, and Harry, the other members of One Direction. I’ve read, with tears in my eyes, the heartfelt, desperate, genuine statements put out by each of the boys. I cried over Zayn writing “Liam, I have found myself talking out loud to you, hoping you can hear me.” I took screenshots of all the old band pictures Louis shared on his story. And in my heart, I formed an image of these boys scrolling through all the moments of their boyband days, chronicled forever in digital form on social media.

How wonderful, how wretched, that we can never truly die in this age of social media. How strange it is to be surrounded by all these digital graves. How good it is to live forever in the memories of our friends and fans. And how dearly do we long for true immortality, that quality of eternal life that we were made for.

I’ve seen countless tweets in the past two days talking about how this can’t be the timeline in which Liam Payne dies at 31. One tweet even called it an intrinsically disordered event, inadvertently hitting the nail on its head.

Feeling that anguish, I can only look to God and my knowledge of heaven, the only thing that can make sense of this present sadness. I find comfort in the knowledge that death was never meant to be part of the story. That death was never meant to be the end. That this grief I feel in the passing of a man I never knew personally, only points me to the truth, that you and I were created for something more.

What then can we say about these digital graves? I, for one, cherish them. I know that my friend will never respond to my texts ever again, but I will always have the poems she sent me, and that photo of her sitting on the floor in the corner of a college apartment, cradling a cup of khawa in her hands, smiling softly.

And Liam. Leemo. I will always have your music, your way with words and melody that touched so many. I will always have all those videos of you, your smile, your earnestness, your wit. I will always have your funny tweets (SNAKE HABITAT TURN AROUND). And the countless posts made to social media in the wake of your death, telling stories of your life. You funny, compassionate, kind man, you. You will live forever in the memories of your friends.

untitled (digital graves)
a truly terrible poem by me
April 2020

when you send a text
do you ever wonder if it was your last?

i do.
i once read that fifty years from now there will be more dead people on facebook than living
which made me think of all the friend requests i've accumulated over the years and how many of them are worth accepting now
one time i sent the first message on tinder and didn't get a response
and everything's always disappearing on snapchat anyway
what else?
i think twitter wants me dead sometimes
which would mean my last tweet would be about how a nation in mourning makes me feel less alone about my own grief
i never really got the hang of instagram
too many pretty people with good phone cameras
making me feel insecure about my inability to get a caption right
i prefer saving my poetry on my notes app anyway
but then how will anyone know i write?

when i die
how long will it take folks to remove me from group chats?
leave comments on my instagram posts about how i was the prettiest
even with the crappiest phone camera
scroll through my twitter and find all my tweets about death
privately ironic
(hopefully my tinder account will be long gone by then)
share every facebook memory we ever had together
and write lengthy captions about how much they miss me
when the closest contact we've had in the last decade
were the occasional pokes we exchanged
but time moves slower on social media so i might forgive them for still living in the past
at least one thing i can take for granted
everyone's always disappearing on snapchat anyway

1. I named many of my poems in that fashion, inspired by my favourite artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose installation art pieces captured my heart when I first stumbled upon them as a high school student.