Drexit

It began six months ago in a doctor’s surgery. Nobody voted on it, certainly not Dorottya, it was her cells that gave up, they decided that at twenty-eight years old, after four years of living in London, the time had come to make an exit. At first she didn’t even understand what the doctor was saying, though she spoke very good English and had done so since she was a girl—her mother hadn’t taken on three jobs, one with the postal service, and two cleaning positions, for Dorottya not to speak good English. But cervical cancer wasn’t in her vocabulary. Cancer, of course, she understood. And the rest didn’t matter. Sadly the diagnosis has come too late, dear Dorothy. Of course it has, she never went for the yearly checkup, and only went this time because she could no longer work. There’s not much more we can do than ease the pain.

She came out to the UK in 2015 for an internship at a small London agency, where she did absolutely everything herself, from image editing and animation to copywriting. As a result she built herself quite a professional Instagram profile. A proper London dream for Hungarians. It worked well because she was alone enough to put a lot of time into it, and because she caught the wave during the emigration curve. Many of her followers were 25-35-year-old women from London, Berlin, Amsterdam, from everywhere you could run away to, as if on the internet all these cities had melted into one big Hungarian village. But there was another interesting category among her followers, the 55-65-year-old women and men, nearly always in Hungary. These were the followers who liked and commented the most. Dorottya knew that through her they were keeping in touch with their own emigrated children. She became the girl living their children’s lives.

Cervical. Cancer. She could leave her home for London. But how could she escape from cancer?

It’s not losing her life Dorottya is most afraid of. It’s that her mum won’t feel it was worth it, she still thinks her child is out there in the unknown, living a happy life. But if she makes an early exit, then every hour her mother worked overtime, every evening she made do without, every day she was lonely over the last four years becomes utterly pointless. If she has to lose her mum, at least she wants to believe her mum is happy.

Dorottya. Exit. Drexit. The perfect departure: immortalising for her mother the life she could have led. Her mum was sixty-five, in their family every woman on the maternal side died before their seventy-fifth birthday, her mum might outlive them by five years at most, so she had maximum fifteen years left. Dorottya had to produce fifteen years’ worth of Instagram material.

“Dorothy, your condition will dramatically deteriorate within a month.”

“Okay, but when will I die?” she asks, like she was at the office, asking for a deadline.

“We can’t say for sure. A couple of months. Half a year.”

She knows, however bad she looks, she can use a filter to make herself beautiful. But she’s also aware she won’t be able to use her hands for long, and the screen will make her so nauseous she won’t be able to work more than two minutes. And there’s no tool for that in Photoshop. She has no time, she has to start the Drexit process.

Drexit phase one: reducing her Instagram activity while she’s still able, because at her current rate she can’t possibly produce fifteen years’ worth of photos and videos in the next few weeks. So she has to wean her followers down to content once a week.

Drexit phase two: though she sometimes wove into her posts an ironic comment on public life, she’ll have to stop that too. After all, she can’t predict the next fifteen years of local and global events. Anyway, it aggravates her little sister when she talks about Hungarian affairs, because either she blames people at home or she makes a drama of everything: you left, keep your yap out of it, Dorottya.

Drexit phase three: working out the life she lives until she’s forty-three. Maybe she decides to move to America, after all, since Brexit England isn’t so enticing, even if she hates Trump, New York is better than a London separated from Europe; in Manhattan she meets Tom, her husband-to-be, at a trendy marketing party; they date, they travel, they move in together, they get married, they have children, two, two little girls, Sarah and Elisabeth; Dorottya puts on weight during the pregnancy, her mother and her sister are prone to gaining weight, but she discovers an effective diet to lose the excess; her marriage with Tom faces a small crisis due to stress; they move into a row house in a small town in New Jersey an hour or so from Tom’s work, in an incredibly boring place; but by then Dorottya has made contacts through work, so manages to establish her own agency called Dorothy’s, she has to design the logo tonight; so Sarah and Elisabeth start kindergarten there, Tom commutes, by train of course, the commute wears them both out, meanwhile Tom falls in love with one of his colleagues, he moves out, but realises he can’t live without Dorottya, so a couple of weeks later he comes back, which is when they decide to have another child; little Tim has Down’s Syndrome, perhaps he came too late, but he’ll teach them all sorts of new things.

Drexit phase four: one post a week, that entails producing seven hundred and eighty posts to last fifteen years. She picks Tom, Sarah, Elisabeth and little Tim from a New York extras agency portfolio; a baby Sarah and a three-, six-, nine-, and twelve-year-old Sarah, a baby Elisabeth and a three-, six-, and nine-year-old Elisabeth, and only a baby little Tim, and for Tom she just picks one man, because there’s only one of her, any idiot can age a photo. She spends half of her savings on the photo series; the two of them go to the Grand Canyon, to Toronto with the three-year-old Sarah, to Hawaii with the six-year-old Sarah and the three-year-old Elisabeth. Then they book their flat-to-be for a week through Airbnb, and set up their life in New Jersey. The photos cover fifteen summers, fifteen autumns, fifteen winters, fifteen springs, and suddenly she’s sitting at forty-three years of age on the patio of the suburban row house with a communal garden, little Tim in her lap, Tom playing with the twelve-year-old Sarah and the nine-year-old Elisabeth. Dorottya watches them, rocking Tim, then runs with Tim over to the girls and hugs them. She smells their hair. The girls are a bit scared, they knew they were going to be in an advert, they didn’t know the mother in the advert would squeeze them so tight, but they give in to the embrace. During the night of the last day Dorottya edits the photos: under the cursor her chest lowers, her bottom spreads, she copies the wrinkles from mum’s old pictures onto her own face. Tom loses his colour as the stress wears down his spirit. And the same night she writes the captions, all seven hundred and eighty, though not just one or two words and an emoji, as she usually does; she writes long candid descriptions of their trials and tribulations, and she’s grateful for every second of joy.

Drexit phase five: when she’s been vomiting for a week solid she activates the plan. She stops posting from her own life, and starts the photo series. She schedules the captions, the last one for 13 June 2034, and just hopes that Instagram will still exist, and that her mother won’t live a day longer and will never know she’s long gone. She barely replies to comments, though plenty are thrilled Tom and her have found one another, and hope their new life in America will be a success. But she can’t be too active, slowly, she has to leave off. And it works, by the third week she’s basically just a follower of her own profile, so delirious with painkillers she can’t remember which post is coming next. Over and over, Dorothy’s magical and honest life takes her by surprise, and she looks forward to new updates.

Drexit phase six: the most difficult. She has to get into such a fight with her sister and her mother that they only follow her on Instagram. She can’t call them, because though she can manipulate the picture, her voice will give her away. Hence why she had herself move to America in her Instagram life. After all, she knows neither her mum nor her sister could afford to fly out—plus, they’d be scared of the long flight. She writes them a farewell letter, tells them that she’s moving to America, which at least sets the seal on the distance she’s felt for years; that it’s not their fault, but the life they live is so different, it’s inconsistent with her own; that she’s done with Hungary, she doesn’t want to ever go back, and she’d like to hold on to them in her memory as they are now; she doesn’t want to watch them go down the tubes like the rest of the country; that she can’t reveal where she’ll be living; I’m asking you not to look for me, please, bye Mum, I’ll miss you, and thank you for everything.

Drexit phase seven: setting up a monthly anonymous transfer from the remaining half of her savings to her mum for the next fifteen years.

Drexit phase eight: final exit.