I am only a YouTube comment

I am a YouTube comment with 4,000 likes, and close to 300 replies. I have also been well and truly pinned to the page.

Words don’t get much cop nowadays. In the olden days, they were a big deal, they made a fuss over you but now they’re easy-come easy-go and people take them for granted. Take my situation. I’m one of the lucky ones. Fortunate enough to be there at the right time. Someone came along and picked me, well they picked my words and put them in a particular order, and that’s how I came into being, but most of the time you won’t see light of day. In the olden days, words were used in Borges’ The Library of Babel or the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. When they put you together you were safe and imperious, even slightly cocky, you were something solid, but above all you meant something to people and you made them feel they had a purpose.

Most of my time I spend lazing about, looking out, looking at all the people who come along and scroll over me. Don’t get me wrong, it feels good to be scrolled over, to be used for your words. To be scanned with those peering eyes, millions of pairs of eyes, and then I lie in wait, my heart beating fast, I wait in the shadows for that ‘like’, and I know it’s coming, but I daren’t move, I daren’t let them know I’m onto them, I have to pretend I don’t see, pretend that I’m dead, that I don’t matter. I am a snake.

Then it comes.

But they take me for granted, these people, they really do.

I am a sentence, I am a fully-formed sentence; that’s not too bad is it. I am actually one half-sentence and one fuller one, prefaced by the name of the person who speaks those words. Here is me:

No one:

Me: HEEE be like…fries with that, LOL?

The video I’m pinned to is about French Fries and is a bit of a young person’s caper. I won’t go into it.

I am only one a word, one sentence among billions of sentences. How did I get here? How long must I wait? How long will I stay? What if I were the entirety of all seven volumes of Proust's  À la recherche du temps perdu?

Don't get me wrong, 4,000 likes is a heck of a lot of likes but then the video's been viewed a heck of a lot of times.

One of my friends is a meme.

I am a YouTube comment with 4,000 likes.