Viewing Pleasure
after watching too many ASMR videos
Those sweet sibilant esses and eye contact with the camera
and whisps of tingles inside my scalp that I chase like a junkie
video after video and my favorite’s a woman who pretends
to be a travel agent for an intergalactic vacation and when I
confess this to my husband (the tingles, the chase) he laughs
and he laughs even more when I press play because no
he does not feel it too nor does he care to see close-up shots
of dainty fingers lighting delicate candles or boiling miniature
pots of spaghetti how weird and yes it is weird is it not
that someone took the time and studied the set and steadied
the camera and edited down the footage into nineteen minutes
of which I will watch maybe three or four panning ahead
to the good parts (tiny tongs plating pasta on a nickel) but
is it not strange too that I will click next and skip through
their handiwork like hopscotch stare at their fingers grazing
the table and grace them with the purest form of love which is
attention. My husband who cradles our baby in the early light
and reports on his burgeoning smiles confesses that he watches
simulations of the final moments before terrible catastrophes
shipwrecks nuclear fallout airplane crashes two hundred gone
just like that but he can’t look away and meanwhile he takes
a video of our son in his lap laughing for the very first time.
Emily Siner is a Pulitzer-finalist journalist whose writing has been published in The Offing and on NPR.org. She was short-listed for the Lascaux Review Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She was a 2022-2023 Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Ireland and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.