The Day I Broke Up With My BlackBerry (In Verse)
I was cleaning out an old laptop this weekend, the kind of digital archaeology you do when you’re looking for an ancient tax document and instead unearth a dusty resume from 2004 that makes you wince at your own “Objective Statement.” Several hundred photos of a dog who’s just a furry memory now, too.
Somewhere between those artifacts, I found a poem.
I wrote it. In 2009.
To my BlackBerry.
Not about my BlackBerry. To it. Second person. Direct address. The literary equivalent of leaving a Post-it on someone’s desk that starts with “We need to talk.” (Because, you know, I’m a writer and I can’t help myself.)
Before I show you the evidence, a little scene-setting, because if you’re under 35 you may not grasp what a big deal this breakup actually was. In 2009, BlackBerry wasn’t a punchline yet — it was the empire. Research In Motion held 56 percent of the U.S. smartphone market that year, the Curve outsold the iPhone in the first quarter, and Fortune had just named RIM the fastest-growing company in the country. So much so that the newly inaugurated President Obama spent his first days in office in a genuine standoff with the Secret Service and the NSA over whether he’d be allowed to keep his. He won. “I’m still holding onto my BlackBerry,” he told CNBC. “They’re going to have to wrest it from my grip.”
Everyone else was in it just as deep, which is where the term “CrackBerry” came from — a nickname that stuck hard enough to become Webster’s New World Dictionary‘s Word of the Year in 2006. We joked about the addiction, and then kept doing exactly what the addiction described: thumbs going at all hours on those tiny raised keyboard buttons, necks bent, the little red light blinking like a tiny persistent conscience.
I was one of those thumbs. My BlackBerry and I had history. Real history. The kind you write poetry about, apparently, when you’re breaking it off.
Here is my poem, reproduced exactly as I found it:
You were my first
And I was young.
It was love.
But something has changed.
Is it you or
Is it me?
Together, we went everywhere.
You shined bright, day and night, and I beamed with pride.
But now
You call to me
And I struggle – fumble – to answer.
I am sorry.
There is someone else.
Sleek and smooth.
Shinier still.
Your touch is different now –
And I feel lost.
This is Siri-ous.
Is it you or
Is it me?
It is, in fact, you.
My dearest Blackberry…
I have purchased an iPhone.
___
I have since fallen in love with many, many more phones.
None have gotten a poem.
Make of that what you will: either I’ve matured, or the BlackBerry really was the last one that meant something.
And don’t even get me going about my 1996 Palm Pilot.
David Grady: Words and Pictures 
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