Her finger trembled. She thought of the 1,247 bricks.
She scrolled his recent tweets. A retweet of a tech guru claiming DEI was "inverse racism." A pithy quote about how "cancel culture is destroying nuance." A selfie at a protest—holding a sign, but standing off to the side, not in the crowd.
Lena’s blocked list was, by any metric, a masterpiece. twitter blocked list
was for the aggressors. The people who quote-tweeted her hot takes about a TV show finale just to add, "L take, go touch grass." The man who DM’d her a single eggplant emoji at 2 AM. The anonymous accounts with default avatars and pinned retweets of Andrew Tate.
A new folder appeared in her mind: .
His name was Tom. He was a guy she’d gone on three perfectly fine dates with three months ago. He liked sourdough and hiking and talked about his feelings. She had thought, Maybe . But then he’d gone quiet. Now, he surfaced with a reply to her thread about algorithmic bias. Tom (@tombakesbread): I’m not saying racism isn't real. I’m just saying you seem to see it everywhere. Maybe the problem isn't the platform, it’s your perspective? Just trying to have a good-faith discussion. Lena stared at the notification. The little bell icon. The poison chalice.
was the saddest folder: The Fallen Friends. People she’d laughed with, shared memes with, sent care packages to. Until they revealed, slowly or all at once, that they thought her existence—as a bisexual, as a woman in tech, as someone who didn't think billionaires were folk heroes—was the real problem. Her finger trembled
The block list wasn't a prison. It was a filter . Every second she spent explaining to Tom why "just asking" was a form of exhaustion was a second she wasn't writing her novel, or calling her mom, or taking a deep breath and feeling the sun on her face.