Can posting a thirst trap on Instagram help you process grief after unspeakable loss?

This story is part of Image issue 5, “Reverence,” an exploration of how L.A. does beauty. See the full packageOne of my best friends took her life in late August. Plunged into despair, I posted several pictures in her tribute on my Instagram account. I had no language to describe my grief; I was at a complete loss for words

that might make sense of what had happened. I helped her family make funeral arrangements, communicated with friends about the news and created a memorial website. After the funeral — after the friends who had traveled to L.A. for the repast had gone home, after the condolence flowers sent by loved ones had withered and been tossed — I was alone again. A strange sensation came over me: I could hardly believe I was still alive, walking and breathing in a world my dear friend no longer lived in.

Taking myself to the beach seemed the only thing that would alleviate my panic at this dissonant reality. The scale of the Pacific — and me, insignificant against its glittering blue vastness — oriented me toward this new sense of myself. One day, about two weeks after the funeral, I posted a photo of myself on Instagram wearing a triangle top string bikini, my body reflected in the full-length mirror in my living room. I captioned it: A grief trap.

I’ve always enjoyed consuming thirst-trap photos — of stratospherically hot celebrities like Rihanna and Channing Tatum, and of IRL friends, whose horny online antics I wholeheartedly support. I’ve played the enthusiastic art director, wardrobe stylist and camerawoman for many a delightful trap-setting production. Occasionally, I indulge in posting thirst traps myself, of the mockingly ironic “felt cute, might delete later” variety.

People replied to my “grief trap” with loving comments , as they’d done to the previous posts with old pictures of my dearly departed friend. Yet others responded the way one would to a putative thirst trap . There was something deliciously deranged about it: a provocative photo of me wearing very little, on my way to the beach — the lowest-common-denominator genre of social media content — posted in the wake of my devastating grief, and the curious combination of sympathy and thirst below.

Lets have a show of hands here of people who are old enough to remember when the L.A. Times reported NEWS?!

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