Linked Like We Once Were

Illustration by Raquel

We don’t talk. She can’t, so I won’t. And that’s it.

Which is why my heart thumped like my mother testing a watermelon when she showed up in my inbox. I took a deep breath to brace myself and read the subject line:

Invitation to connect on LinkedIn

Just like that, a form email from a website I don’t even use filled my ears with her voice and pushed my tongue against her crooked teeth. An automated message, practically anonymous, triggered the emotional memory of a hundred emails breathlessly written, dizzily read.

If I search her name in my Gmail account, I’ll find all those notes with YouTube links and articles. I’ll find the photos my friend Caleb took of us for his class project, the ones that show how in love I was even before I knew it. I’ll find the longing messages we sent after we “broke up” because I moved away that all end with “I love you” — and then, suddenly, the emails we sent when we tried to stay friends after she moved on and left me behind. More recently, I’ll find the unanswered letters I sent to her trying desperately to make sense of the cavernous ache in my heart. I’ll find evidence that I sent a link to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” and told her I dedicated the last verse to her (Goodbye is too good a word, babe.)

I sent her one last email on December 31, 2013 to tell her sorry and that I’d always care. At midnight, I whiskey-cried at our favorite bar in front of all our mutual friends. In the light of day, while I drank 2014’s mimosas made with 2013’s sangria, I got as close to over it as a person can get through simply deciding. And yet, I trembled to see her name in my inbox for the first time in a year. Suddenly she’s back in my dreams.

This is the great fuckery of falling out of love in the age of technology: So many invisible threads hold us together. She lingers forever in my profile picture album and my iMessage logs. Even when I try to avoid these archives, a robot can coopt her name and remind me just what it felt like to love her.

We met the night after I called myself queer for the first time, and she took me back to her co-op where I kicked off my shiny wingtip shoes and everything that happened next was as fumbling as you might suppose. I already had my ticket to leave for Nicaragua in four months, but I didn’t see the harm in a casual, fun thing to distract me from my senior thesis. This was the rookiest of all rookie mistakes. We saw Tegan & Sara together at SXSW. She taught me to polka dance. We drank Four Roses Bourbon from the bottle and made out in a doorway. We cooked lentils and admired men’s hats together. I introduced her to my parents (my mom knew she was my girlfriend; my stepdad didn’t). In these mundane acts, I learned to be queer. That is to say, I learned to be myself.

The last thing she said to me in person was “I love you” for the first time. Seconds later, she sprinted away to catch the bus to Houston; days later I boarded a plane for Managua. We didn’t know her mouth wasn’t big enough to hold those words.

In a tidier tale, I’d say “And that was the end.” But it wasn’t, of course. We had email to share pictures, Facebook chat to fill in for texting, and Skype for sex and remembering each other’s voices. We talked every day I could get Internet access, and it kept my heart rooted in Texas and my fingers laced through hers. After it ended for real, I was determined to keep in touch and maybe even be friends.

I’ve maintained decade-long international friendships through AIM, Facebook and email, so our contact felt natural, took only seconds. I’d send her pictures of piglets I met in my work in rural areas, and she’d send me songs I had to hear. It was so easy until it wasn’t: Until my resentment exceeded my love for her, until her fear exceeded her hope. But the world we made lingers. The moon is always full there; the popcorn is always fresh. I can never pretend I didn’t love her, because that beloved version of her remains frozen in cyberspace like so many selfies.

These days, all dating is online dating. Clean breaks don’t jive with the way we use technology. I hid her on Facebook, but she pops up in my feed when mutual friends tag her in photos. I unstarred the mix CD she made me (the one with Joshua Radin’s “A Fear You Won’t Fall” and John Mayer’s “Slow Dancing In A Burning Room” back to back — a truly prescient combo), but I still see her songs in iTunes when I listen to Cat Power and Sigur Ros. I took her photo off my wall, but she peppers my iPhoto archives. And since she passively lingers, it’s so easy to take the next step and check her newsfeed to find out about her trip to Europe. It’s so easy to send her a chat asking if she heard Brittney Griner got engaged. It’s so easy to see that she read it and didn’t respond.

It’s so hard to let go in a world where social media thrives on nostalgia and insists we stick together. She and I created a life together, and so much of it remains in the cloud. Sure, I could get a lot closer to purging her, but that’s not how we learn to use the cloud, or how I do anything. My mother taught me to be a packrat, and tech folks insist we back up everything in three places — just in case. I remain Facebook friends with the kid I hated in my 11th grade English class; why would I defriend the person who helped bring me to life? I have at least 100 expired REI coupons in my inbox; why would I delete all those I love yous?

Why get rid of something forever when it costs me nothing to keep it? I might need it later. I might need a reminder that I have a beating heart after all.

A few weeks after the LinkedIn email, she contacted me directly for the first time in half a year. She called me my middle name, Faye, a relic from the days when we were each other’s person and such intimacies lit my skin on fire. I saw it in my messages folder but didn’t open the chat so she wouldn’t get the “read” notification. It feels kinder to let her think I just missed it somehow. Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the follow up email from LinkedIn reminding me it’s not too late to connect.