GHOSTING

I did not grieve the boy who sent me angsty Blink-182 lyric videos and tried to use me for drugs.

My exes love to haunt me on the internet. Their names pop up in the “People You May Know” section on Facebook and in my “Suggested Accounts” on Instagram. I’ve seen them highlighted in my “Most Compatible” profiles on Hinge, and once LinkedIn even asked if I’d like to endorse someone who had ghosted me for their communication skills. I would not.  

Sometimes, these virtual run-ins make me laugh. Other times, they make me want to throw my phone at the wall, and just once, they inspired me to drunkenly purchase a Tinder Gold subscription to see whether an old flame in my neighborhood would swipe right when they saw how hot I looked in my new photos (they did not). Usually, though, they’ll invoke a fleeting memory—the smell of someone’s cologne, the intonation in their voice every time we said goodbye on the phone, how they flashed their headlights at my window to let me know they were outside late at night—and then I’ll go on with my day.

As visceral as these digital reminders can be, they are also mundane. Oh, my high school boyfriend lives in L.A. now? Cool. That guy I almost threw up on after I drank way too much on our date is still posting shitty techno on his SoundCloud? Good for him. My extra woke ex is live-streaming himself reading the grad school admissions essay I helped him write, when he hasn’t even gotten in yet? Of course he is. These glimpses into the routines of people I used to know, and maybe love, are mostly boring reminders that I’m content, or even thrilled, to not have them in my life anymore. In the words of Ariana Grande, “thank u, next.” 

But sometimes they’re not.

I used to automatically delete most university-wide emails, until being unemployed and unmotivated during my semester off left me so bored that I would read anything. One day, while skimming through my inbox, I saw the subject line: “We mourn the tragic passing of ____  ____”. In the eulogy that followed, he was a “model student” who “always put others first.” To me, he had been the boy who spammed me with “u up?” texts and requests for Adderall and copies of my bio study guide.

Our last communication had been six months prior, when he sent me a link to an acoustic version of his favorite Blink-182 song. It had been two months since we’d last talked. I saw his name pop up on my phone during a night out; my friends and I were celebrating my birthday in Las Vegas with lots of blackjack and too much whiskey. Reading his message hours later as I left the table to cash in my chips, I remembered that terrible poker face he’d put on whenever we played Texas hold ‘em on the floor in my dorm room.

Mark Hoppus’s whiney voice spilled out of my phone speaker when I opened the link he sent me in the casino bathroom. I drunkenly shot back a photo of myself from that night, smiling in a low cut dress with a birthday cake sparkler. “Celebrating in Vegas!!” was all I said, having lost patience for his brooding late-night messages when I ended things months earlier. I scoffed then, but I don’t roll my eyes anymore when I re-read his text or hear Mark Hoppus moan about being “bored to death and fading fast”—a coroner’s report that came out a couple of weeks after the school-wide email would rule his death a suicide. 

When ____ and I dated, he was quiet and angsty, but I never thought he was suicidal. We met in class, on a day when I had an interview immediately afterwards. It was for a sex educator position, so I would need to teach something. I’d planned on sharing a card trick but quickly realized as I walked to the auditorium that I had no idea how it actually worked.

 Racking my brain for something I could share instead, I ran with the first thing that popped into my head. I’d gone on a backcountry hiking trip weeks earlier, where I’d learned all about “leave no trace” camping. It felt ridiculous, but teaching my interviewers how to poop in the woods seemed like the perfect way to show them I could talk openly about anatomy, STIs, and condoms without embarrassment. I stopped by the store and grabbed a few props—a chocolate egg, a container of frosting that I’d empty out and fill with dirt, and a giant bottle of diet coke, because I was thirsty—and brought them to class.

When the lecture ended, I started to gather my things. I didn’t notice ____ walking over.

“A jar of frosting and a diet coke, that’s quite the combination,” he said.

I looked up. He was really cute, with quiet eyes and a leather jacket that matched mine, but that smirk annoyed me. I tried to come back with something that would disarm him.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s for a demo on how to poop in the woods.”

He grinned again. “I know a thing or two about that.”

Amused by our exchange and impressed by his composure, I told him he should tell me about it sometime. I slipped him my number as we left the auditorium, and he texted me that night.

Soon, we were grabbing food after class and sleeping together a few times a week. Most nights, we’d sit silently on my floor and play cards for a while first, listening to music. He never stayed over. 

He’d often text me when he got home. Sometimes he’d send a sweet message about that night, but it was usually something cryptic or a link to a song. It was cute at first, and then annoying. I didn’t want to listen to Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” over and over again, or care that he was “thinking about la vie et la mort” at 1am—I don’t think he even spoke French. Later asking what had been on his mind didn’t help; he’d respond with a shrug, sometimes saying, “what makes you think I’m thinking of you?”.

About one month in, I felt a shift. The sex was never great, but it got worse. He started coming over less, and then not at all. A few weeks after we last saw each other, he texted, “hey!”. He waited until I responded, asking how he’d been, to try to get some of my Adderall. He kept asking until I got tired of feeling hopeful each time he resurfaced only to be disappointed by another request. I told him to stop contacting me, and he did. I started sitting towards the front in class, and he stopped going.  

As the semester ended, I’d think about him every now and then and wonder how he was doing. Looking back through his texts didn’t help me to understand him better like I’d hoped it would, but I still kept the messages. I didn’t hear from him again until that night in Vegas.

I did not grieve the boy who sent me angsty Blink-182 lyric videos and tried to use me for drugs. To me, the laudatory statements people made on his online obituary read like a series of paid-for Yelp reviews. When they called him “generous,” all I could think about was the way he’d lay naked on my bed and interlace his fingers behind his head, waiting for me to do all the work during sex. When they said he was “brilliant,” I remembered the time he sprayed himself with my pepper spray, not believing me when I said it would hurt his eyes. When they posted photos of him as a smiley baby, I saw him scowling as he leaned out my window to smoke. 

Scrolling through those posts introduced me to an entirely different person. While others came together to remember a son, student, and friend, the boy I knew became alien and walled-off, relegated to the text chains in my phone. We hadn’t known each other’s friends or family, which meant our relationship survived only in my head. Considering how things ended between us, maybe it was better that way. 

But the more I read about ____, the more my view of him softened. Good moments rejoined the bad, like his subtle grin when we’d meet outside my building late at night. I remembered how he had looked at me in class that first day and searched online for the lecture recording. It was still published, and I watched the whole thing at double speed: him glancing over at me throughout class and stalling as I packed up my things; the huge smile that filled my face when I looked up at him. The video ended as we exited the classroom together, him typing my number into his phone. I don’t know how many times I re-watched it.   

As I thought back, the bad moments started changing, too. His late-night messages now felt less pretentious and more concerning, and while I couldn’t excuse the times he’d lashed out or shut down, I felt I understood them better now. Even though I’d encouraged him to see a counselor, I wondered if I should have pushed harder, and whether he might still be here if I had. We were never really dating, so I’d just let him fade away. 

The more I thought about how things changed between us, the more I realized that at one point, to the guys on his soccer team,  ____ might have been the player who put his teammates first. Maybe science just wasn’t his thing, and to his English professor, he really was that model student. I grieved the versions of him that I could have known, and the person he might have been if he had only grown up a little (and maybe gone to therapy). Hopefully his music taste would have matured, too.

I don’t go on social media much anymore, but when I do, I occasionally check up on the exes that used to haunt me. The one in L.A. just landed his dream job and lives with his new girlfriend; they have a puppy together. The SoundCloud DJ dropped the eastern European dance music, and now he’s into jazz. The activist ex’s performative wokeness hasn’t changed, but at least he posts fewer shirtless photos now. I scroll through their feeds because it gives me a glimpse into who they are today, and a chance to  think about all the good versions of them that somebody else might get to know.

AUTHOR: A.W. is in her senior year at Brown and lives in Austin, Texas. She's probably feeling haunted by the fashion choices of her middle school emo phase, listening to David Bowie, or trying to remember where she parked her car.
ARTIST: Sijia Wang