LoFi Girl is a Thing with Feathers

Once, I thought the LoFi Girl from Youtube & her googly-eyed headphones had vanished. It was winter & I had forgotten how to find her. In her livestream square now, snowflakes pepper the window view, thirty-five thousand other people in their own worlds as she wipes cursive letters in a small notebook again & again, letters obscured, as if LoFi Girl could be writing stories about anything. A piano sinks & out, notes plinking, a singing object unaware of how seasons change & winged creatures migrate. How LoFi Girl has never owned a bird. How, when a bird molts, keratin-coated pins like baby hairs protrude from their follicles because, contrary to popular belief, fur & feathers & hair bloom from a common place. How a bird releases their feathers into the damp air, new quills taking shape, skin suddenly tender to the touch. What will one day become new feathers will remain shrunken & blood-filled, a point of sensitivity begging to go untouched.

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I’m bone-cold & temporary in this Northern snow globe, where the cold always fights to get in. I flinch when I’m waiting tables & a stranger grazes my arms. The snow won’t stop piling & piling. Even during the dark midnights of June & July; nights that don’t slink out until 10 PM, a frigid whisper from Lake Superior shrouds our town. We are acquainted with summer sweatshirts & the possibility of May blizzards. Days growing shorter. Frost coating the earth as early as September. As winter approaches & the minutes of daylight dwindle, I force down Vitamin D capsules & bask in a SAD light morning after morning, finding humor in the acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder articulating one of its primary symptoms.

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I recently learned that dried-up feathers discarded long ago were once ground up into silty protein powder & used in a lean-muscle experiment in which an unspecified majority of human test subjects had growth, their cores hardened from the consumption of something soft, then unsoft. When I think of birds, I picture my mother age ten & her elderly cockatiel with its fat orange cheeks, scribbling or to freeze out the quiet. I picture her swapping yearbooks with LoFi girl. Taking selfies together or road tripping to Lilith Fair in a VW Bus or smoking her roommate’s pot before a basement screening of Yellow Submarine.

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I’m flipping tarot cards, desperate to read myself anywhere outside this flightless body.

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Thank God LoFi Girl lives on. A demanding internet explosion & dedicated fanbase & frantic petitions circulated the blood back into her veins after her infamous study beats livestream was briefly taken down. LoFi Girl has been alive since. Always will be. I want to celebrate by making myself beautiful & sharp, so I go to the bookshelf. Grab the plastic package of artificial claws & almost put them on, but fuck, I hate how fake nails pop off. This particular package contains a set of long, ruby talons, gleaming like a parrot’s plumage. If only I didn’t start biting my nails during my earliest days of having teeth. No tricks with scotch tape or hot sauce are a match for my mindless picking & gnawing. I am only animal at best.

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When I think of birds, I think of all the parasite-ridden avians tragically splayed across the pavement. The four-hearted shells of lovers without teeth. A sweet aftergrowth born from the rot. A song to sway back & forth to like a warning without words.

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On Reddit, I stumble across an art compilation of various culturally-distinct depictions of Lofi Girl. Her animal sidekick shapeshifts: the tiger cat with a pendulum tale morphing from pinstriped to tabby-ed, or glacier white or tall-eared or just a pot of aloe or nothing at all. I learn her real name is Shizuku Tsukishima, & that she was chosen from Studio Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart. I ask myself if Shizuku’s voice actress is still alive. If she hasn’t been poisoned or stabbed like so many other girls who come & go behind greenscreens or alleyways. If Shizuku is okay with me calling her LoFi Girl, like it’s some doting nickname & we’ve been friends for years. Or, if she feels reduced; minimized to nothing but a nameless girl associated with background music. A girl who doesn’t speak.

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In this season with little sunlight, the precipitation continues. Globed streetlights glow, spaced apart like a zipper’s teeth. Skies pale. A spill of cumulus clouds hangs above, ready to gather up the hydrogen amassing inside & finally let go. Dusk forms a large mouth overhead. Ice forever swallows my cherry Honda. Each morning equates to scraping & shivering. Sometimes, I sit with terrible posture in the driver’s seat, heat propelling from angled vents at full speed, hoping my avoidance will result in a defrosted windshield. Anything to avoid the bite of winter. Even from behind glass, this corner of the planet looks like Narnia & I can’t help but reminisce on the time my mother first read me C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew over my bed. How real the lion & children felt when they had her voice.

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LoFi Girl is a distant bird or airborne creature or a rainbow’s end: hope we can reach towards, but never truly touch.

Photo by Ozgu Ozden on Unsplash