Page 16 of Love from Pretty Beach

D arby woke the next morning with a peculiar sensation, as if something fundamental had changed in her world, but it took her a moment to remember exactly what.

Then, as she turned over and looked at her phone, a tsunami of thoughts flooded back to her.

The video. The comments. Over ten thousand people had found their way into her kitchen, watched her confession that she was at a dead end and blue.

By way of the comments, subscribers and likes, those viewers had decided that what she’d rambled on about was actually worth listening to. The world moved in mysterious ways.

Full of trepidation, she winced a little bit as she reached for her phone.

Tapping on her channel was like opening an email with medical test results or tax bills; you knew you had to have a look, but didn’t really want to.

As she blinked and stared at the stats, she shook her head.

The video, rather than slowing down, had continued to gain momentum.

It seemed as if it had taken on a will of its own.

The view count had climbed, the comments section had exploded, and the number of messages was frankly overwhelming.

'Blooming heck.' Darby muttered to Lola, who was watching from her basket. The look on Lola’s face said that she’d long since given up trying to understand human behaviour. 'What have I done? What in the world have I done? I need help.'

Scrolling through some of the new comments whilst still in bed, Darby was flabbergasted and amazed by the stories pouring in.

Women from all over the country and apparently several other countries as well shared their own experiences.

Of being lonely, feeling confused, career dissatisfaction, and the peculiar grief that came with a successful part of life reaching its natural conclusion.

One comment made her pause: I've shared this with my daughter because I wanted her to understand why I've been so odd since she left for university.

She called me crying yesterday, saying she finally understood why I seemed sad even though she's doing well.

Thank you for helping us talk about something we couldn't find words for. Please post more.

Dropping her phone onto the duvet, Darby stared at the ceiling. She'd gone to bed as someone whose biggest decision was whether to have Marmite or jam on her morning toast, and woken up as someone who had messages from all over the world.

Getting up and going through her usual morning routine and a quick check of the weather through the kitchen window, Darby couldn’t really make head nor tail of what had happened.

Thousands of people had watched her talk about how she was lonely and lost. Quite embarrassing, really. Surely, she sounded like a loser?

Her phone rang as she was buttering her toast and Penny's name appeared on the screen.

'Morning. I’ve just been reading through the comments. There’s even a journalist on there.’

Darby groaned. ‘Don’t say that! I’m thinking about deleting it. You said to hold my horses, so I haven’t removed it yet. What if someone sees it?’

‘Like who? Over my dead body. You are not deleting it! You are now an internet celebrity…'

'Don’t even joke. I keep thinking I should scrub the whole thing and pretend it never happened, but then I read another comment from someone saying it helped them, and I can't bring myself to do it.'

'Don't you dare delete it! You've started something great, Darbs.'

'I don't want to start something great.' Darby took a bite of toast. 'I just wanted to explain to you why I've been so rubbish lately.'

'Well, you've done that and more. The question is, what are you going to do next? What was that other video you said you’d started?'

Darby thought about the large amount of footage she now had on her phone. ‘I’ve got a few things on my phone that I didn’t use in that first one, so I suppose I could put those together.’

‘I think you should get one up sooner or later and strike while the iron’s hot.’

'I don't know. The whole point was that I don't know what I'm doing with my life. How do you make content about not having content?'

'People clearly want to see that journey.'

‘I guess.’

‘Don’t do anything rash. I’ll speak to you later. I’m just getting into the car and it will cut over as it switches to the car system and I need to phone Jack.’

‘Okay, yes, see you later.’

Pondering what to do, Darby took a sip of tea and seriously considered deleting the whole thing.

However, the fact that people appeared to have been helped by her mutterings about toast and empty rooms felt good.

And wasn’t that, well, to be quite frank, rather extraordinary?

Sighing, she mulled it over. It was all a bit overwhelming.

She liked things small and manageable, but now, quite without meaning to, she’d wandered into something big.

It was funny because the whole point of it had started as a way for her not to wither away. It had done that and then some.

With her mind galloping off ahead, she tried to just roll with it.

The truth was, she’d been feeling, not totally lost, but certainly untethered for a long time.

And now here was this thing that could be a start of something, well, positive .

Not only was it probably good for her, but it wasn’t that hard at all.

Working with a wall and a dog had given her quite a good grounding in chatting to something or someone who didn’t respond.

She’d literally flicked her camera on her phone, pressed go and off she’d gone.

Before she could talk herself out of anything, she pulled her phone towards her, tapped through, read a few more messages and pursed her lips. What could possibly go wrong? As Lily had said, she didn’t have anything to lose.

Conversing with Lola, she smiled. ‘We won’t delete it and we will decide to take on this as if it is a course or something. Yes, every day is a school day. I will learn something from this and I will grow. Like a sunflower, I will reach to the sky and bloom.’

Lola blinked, sighed, shifted and closed her eyes as if she’d heard it all before and really could not be bothered to listen to anything else.

Starting to scroll through her camera roll, Darby noted a few videos she would be able to use for the second vlog upload.

She watched a few and then tapped on the one with the flour incident.

Pressing pause, she may have enlarged Archie’s face and other parts of his biological makeup.

Hello, broad shoulders. Feeling her face heat just thinking about what he must have thought of the crazed flour-covered woman with the smoke detector going off and old banger of a car, she shuddered.

Transferring more clips into the editing app, she told herself she was only going to fiddle for a bit, maybe put something together, see how it looked and go from there.

It didn’t take long before she was lost in a world of her own; snipping messy bits, adding a few captions, softening the lighting so the kitchen looked cosier than it did in real life.

By the time she’d got a half-coherent video together, a good hour or more had gone by, and the morning had stretched towards lunchtime.

She sat back and watched it play through.

It was so very far from polished, but it was most certainly honest. If she’d learned anything over the time that the first video had been accidentally beaming its way into people’s lives, it was that people seemed to like the truth.

Clicking to upload the video to the app, although not publishing yet and before she could change her mind, she spoke to her old friend, the kitchen wall. ‘Right then. Yes, I have finally gone to the dogs, but I am going to go for it. Let’s see what happens next.’