I posted a picture of myself on Twitter yesterday and not thirty seconds later I received a text from a friend asking me if doing so had been intentional.  His inquiry struck me as fair.  The picture was of me in a bikini and that’s not the kind of image I usually toss up on social media so it can be consumed and then potentially criticized by the masses.  Still, I found myself yesterday in a rather what-the-fuck kind of mood, one caused by what I’d guess was a fizzy concoction of the glorious dry heat, the festiveness of a holiday that’s all about freedom, and just how much I like my yellow bikini, all of which were mathematically even in an invisible equation that apparently yielded both joy and the briefest ability to feel brazen.

What I didn’t know was that my picture did not appear on his feed like it had on mine, where my smile was in the center of the frame and you could see just a hint of skin that eventually revealed itself to be cleavage.  No, he sent me a picture of how I looked on his screen and the picture was a clear shot of my tits, barely covered by some thin yellow fabric that no longer struck me as so pretty. When I looked at his text, even my focus didn’t go to trying to decipher what exact shade of yellow it was that I was wearing.  And when you find yourself staring stunned at a close-up image of your own tits – the ones you see each and every day at least three times and thereby become rather immune to the sight of them – you begin to wonder at just how bold you’re willing to be.  Or at least I did.  Sure, I knew full well when I posted it that my chest was on display in the picture, but all of a sudden – seeing it through somebody else’s line of vision – I got freaked out for real.

“Should I take it down?” I asked him after sending him a shot showing him how the picture had appeared on my phone, how it seemed just a cute selfie and not like an advertisement for my own anonymous online escort service.