Pretty much the only thing I’ve ever done on Facebook is try and win back my high school girlfriend.
Not in any active sense, which is what you’d (rightfully) automatically assume when I say something like that. No. She’s married now with two kids and we haven’t spoken in eight years. I’m not, like, liking her statuses or PMing her links she’d enjoy or writing sappy, coy, poignant statuses that try to twist her heart. It’s so much more benign than that. It’s, with every status and photo, with every link shared, I’ve wondered immediately before doing it, “What will Jay think of this.”
It comes into my mind right before I hit send, without fail, a sort of debilitating spell check for trying to make someone love you again.
I wind up deleting a lot
For all I know, she blocked me years ago. Maybe she watches wistfully. Why would she? I’ll cop to it, I do, having seen every posted moment of her life without me. Followed a relationship that blossomed from a beguiling status about a concert where I think they met to pictures, arms around each other, looking at each other, both smiling broadly. They traveled together and moved in together until one day one summer I saw that her best friend had written the word, “WOOOHOOoooHOoo” on her wall.
She looked great on her wedding day, bucking the popular, late 2000s trend of strapless dresses, instead opting for a plunging but classy embroidered V-neck gown.
Look.
I know there’s no way wherein you can recite from almost perfect memory every activity your exes have had since they left you – the olive green dress one wore to a spring college formal, the vacation to St. Thomas another took with her sister – without coming across as unhealthily obsessed and maybe not completely sane.
I wanted to be there with them, not alone the way I was. Even if they long ago wanted me gone, to stop being there, I could. I could always be there. I was. I checked Jay’s Facebook page almost every day for however long it was between Facebook’s inception and her engagement, which, fuck, was maybe four years of constantly wanting some sliver of hope.
Looking made me sad, though, and maybe that’s also what I wanted. That’s why I kept checking after college. Not with Jay, but another. We were dating at the time. Sort of. And I looked, always looked, never feeling good after. Such a visceral reaction to a virtual thing (it’s funny lol, but it was also the feeling that made you not want to eat because why would you bother doing things that kept you alive). It was what I saw, obviously. Her, dancing closely with someone, sitting in that same person’s lap later on in the night, photos she posted, and me, watching from afar in more ways than one, seeing as she stopped loving me.
Which is what happens after college, when you (we) do that tenuous, flimsy, half-hearted long-distance thing, the one driven solely by the fear of not wanting the only person you love to fall in love with someone else. They always do. Ours was only the first generation that got to watch it happen.
I watched it happen. Although that wasn’t the end. Elle and I went through a lot more breakups in the years following that. Fits and starts, loves and hates, three years of it, until one day one June when we broke up, the last of our attempts to “this time really” end things. The next day was her birthday, and the last thing she said to me was “please don’t call.”
A month earlier, I started a job as the social media director for a lobbying firm. I vaguely knew you could theoretically block people from appearing in your News Feed – a feature they’d maybe just rolled out, this being the beginning of summer in 2010 – but I couldn’t even pull up her profile to take that step. To go through with it would be to bring upon myself a finality I couldn’t bear. But I just couldn’t see her in my feed. Not once. Her name, her picture, anything would be enough to drag me in, clicking through to her profile, scrolling, looking, wondering, feeling, subsequently texting. In the face of those seemingly impossible to reconcile imperatives, I came up with only solution that made sense. Every time I pulled up the site, I held a piece of computer paper over the screen, blocking everything except the search bar, so I could navigate where I need to go, then lowering it once I knew I was on a work page where she certainly wouldn’t appear. I spent a whole summer doing that. Three or four times a day. Avoiding it all.
One thing I couldn’t was that I figured she was coming to town at the end of summer, Labor Day, when our college was in D.C. to open its season. I didn’t know she’d be there for certain, but I did, because all week there was an awful swell in my stomach, the kind that can only come about when you’re aware that something you wished wasn’t true is. I waited all week for something bad to happen: a sighting, a call, and it came at the very end. Halftime of the game, Monday night, a text asking if I was there. It rapidly devolved into an interrogation about a date I went on, one that, because of one of those confluences that just happen, happened to be with friend of a friend of a friend of hers. That she’d found out about. She was livid, and I spent the end of an enthralling game arguing into my phone about how we were broken up.
The next morning we spoke again. She said, more open and honest than she was that night, that she was mad because it hurt to find out I was going on dates. Trying to, I guess, save my own face, I asked if well, aren’t you as well?
“I’m actually seeing someone,” came the words.
I hung up. I may have said ‘What?’ but not much more, too stunned to even eke out a thought. Anyway, I didn’t need to hear it from her, I knew where actual answers were. The very next thing I did was pull up the profile I spent all I could do to avoid for three months. As it loaded, I knew it was gonna contain everything I was about to see. Heck, I knew it when she said it, her tone almost conveying surprise, like how did I not already know. I didn’t, because I hadn’t seen the pictures. Her with a guy playing miniature golf. Him at a wedding she earlier asked me to go to. The same guy leading her mom onto the dance floor. They were happy. And I’d never felt so … I don’t have a word for it because she didn’t lie to me and she didn’t deceive me and I wasn’t mad at myself for avoiding it. I didn’t feel fooled or tricked.
I just felt … yes, I was mad, but how can you be upset about finding out about the existence of something?
I called back and said goodbye and then didn’t look at her profile again for almost three years. Which was not how I handled shit when Facebook first rolled out. It came around when, I don’t know how to explain it other than to say that while I’ve never been clinically diagnosed with depression, Facebook appeared at was the lowest point of my life.
Two years without one of those deep, relieving laughs, the kind that are supposed to come along all the time. Alone, having transferred schools in the midst of it all, friendless. When I look back at it, all I can say is I wasn’t happy. I don’t mean that my wishes and wants weren’t being fulfilled. I couldn’t be happy. Everything that should have entertained me — brought me joy — those all deadened with a thud inside my head, falling flat then accumulating, piling up until it seemed like all that was inside me was everything that was making me sad.
It was a lot of shit, but what I pinned all the blame on was the fact that my high school girlfriend didn’t like me anymore. I still loved her, in the way that people who are spurned love, which is to say unrealistically and unfairly. In that very same way, the way people who don’t want to achieve or even entertain real solutions to their problems ascribe a seemingly easy to acquire but actually impossible objective that will assuredly fix it fucking all, I thought everything would be alright if Jay got back together with me.
In that long, wanting time, Facebook arrived. It slowly trickled across college campuses; eventually making ours and I joined. I knew her school got it when the bevy of friend requests arrived from my high school friends who attended her same state university. Then I waited. Anxiously, almost greedily.
Because here was something – something real – that hadn’t existed up until now. A real chance to connect. To rekindle somehow and to be us again. She was gone to me – we hadn’t spoken in years – but that moment, realizing her school had Facebook, I realized there was hope. Because that’s what that site does. It fosters within people the belief that objects in their computer screen appear closer than they actually are.
Especially when they friend you after all those years.
That’s what Jay did. Her school got Facebook and she reached out to me.
That’s gotta mean something.
That’s gotta mean something, right?
It came, the notification, when I was hungover at four, still laying on the shitty Wal-Mart futon in my room, the one I couldn’t even bother to unfurl before I slept. I immediately, I mean hyperventilating as I saw it, slammed my laptop shut.
I wasn’t some old grandmother who didn’t understand how FaceTime worked, yet in every sense of that I was. I couldn’t be seen like that. Because I was hit – instantly distraught – with the realization that she friended a fat, sad, drunk shell of (let me add pathetic) of what she once knew. Of what she once liked. Of what she once loved.
I left my house, went on a walk. Thinking about how in our time apart, I’d done the opposite of what was necessary to get her back. I was farther away than ever. It was … the embarrassment and the disappointment and the fucking, fucking waste of those years where I didn’t try coming to a head in a instant. Here I was, with the first real opportunity I’d ever had, and I’d already failed.
I spent the whole night concocting a message to her. She called me “dude” in her response. “Yea, dude, we should definitely catch up,” she said.
That should have been it. Instead it was the opposite. Instead it was worse because she went from being a nebulous conceit to something tactile and real. That’s maybe the dumbest thing I’ve ever said, because I know it’s not true, but I mean it. Her profile, the existence of it, it was something to me, and who cares if what I put stock in was fake and fallacious and only carried the implied and greater meaning I gave it in my mind?
I still loved her, and from that moment I couldn’t look away.
And that’s why, ever since, I’ve thought about her with everything I’ve done on the site. Because I could see her, and conversely, she could see me. I just wanted her to look.
I don’t think she ever did, not since that first message. Not a like, not a comment, not anything. Still, here I am, eleven years later, unable to shake the feeling before I put something up that all will be alright if she just likes it. Just so I know, that she knows, that I’m still there.
Maybe one day she will.