You Cannot Delete a Person. Only Their Notifications.

I don’t wish him well. I don’t wish him ill. I want him out of my head.

A song played in a coffee shop a couple of weeks ago that I have not been able to get unstuck.

It is not a song he and I had. It is not a song he would have even noticed. And it’s by some band neither of us ever listened to, the kind of melody that has no business reaching me across any distance that makes sense.

But it was playing on a weekday afternoon, somewhere in October. A man at the corner table was reading a paperback. The light in Brooklyn does a very specific thing right around that time of year that I’ve never been able to put into words for anyone who doesn’t already know. I sat there long enough for the barista to wipe down the same table twice. My cortado went cold. I cried into my own hands like a woman who has lost something she can’t even inventory.

This is what happens when you don’t finish a person off.

At various points in the last couple of years, I have sincerely believed I was over him.

I believed it in an airport, somewhere over the Atlantic. I believed it on the cold marble floor of a hotel in Lisbon that I had picked on purpose to be alone in. I believed it on a hiking trail in October, in a dentist’s chair, on the phone with my mother when she asked me again whether I had met anyone new. I was so finished with him that I once texted a friend to announce, with a kind of ceremony, that I was officially finished with him. She wrote back a heart emoji, which was probably the wrong response, and I never brought it up.

And then a song plays. Or a man at a bar orders a Tecate with the lime shoved down the throat of the can, and the gesture is so specifically his that I have to leave. Or I walk into my own apartment on a regular Wednesday night and the radiator makes a sound that is not a sound he has ever made, and I am, anyway, somewhere back inside the whole thing again. Exactly as I was. The radiator has a small dent in the upper left corner that I keep meaning to fix and never do.

I have tried the trick where you’re supposed to spot the thought, name it, and let it pass on through, like a guy at a door you’re desperate to close. I have tried the more expensive version, where you lie on a couch and a real person charges you a ridiculous amount of money an hour to help you hear yourself say things you have already said in your own bathroom mirror at two in the morning. I have read the books you’re supposed to read. I have eaten the fish. I have cut the caffeine. I have, in a moment I am not proud of, paid a clairvoyant in the East Village sixty dollars in cash to tell me he still thinks about me. She might have said it because it is true, or because it is exactly what every woman who walks in there with mascara on the back of my hand wants to hear, and I left her apartment feeling briefly like a million dollars, and then I felt, on the subway home, the exact inverse of a million dollars. Then nothing.

He moved to a city I don’t live in. I moved to a city he does not live in. We did this voluntarily, in the sense that neither of us told the other one, a kind of small, polite collusion, a zip code collision, and the only way to figure out where your own body ended was to leave.

I am not going to say his name. His name still, after everything, makes me feel like a small animal caught in headlights. There was an S in his name, and I’m not telling you where. There was a vowel that I think only I ever pronounced right. I’m not going to defend this.

There is a particular loneliness to not being able to delete someone. It is not the loneliness of being single. It is the loneliness of having a person inside your operating system who you are not in a relationship with and have not been for a couple of years now, give or take, and who has, on his side, presumably, the kind of clear forward motion that makes it acceptable to post a photo of a fish he caught last summer and not tag you in it. The loneliness is being an adult woman with a good job and a one-bedroom and a cat I will not name in a public essay, who is, in her more private hours, still tangled up in some kind of wordless thing with a man whose radiator made a different sound than mine.

I still have his Instagram.

I muted him for almost a year. Then I unmuted him on a Thursday because muting started to feel like giving up a small piece of territory I had been quietly occupying. I do not scroll long. Maybe a minute, if that. Never to the bottom, because I do not want to know how many posts there are. I want the version of him that exists in amber, frozen at the altitude I last knew him at.

Once, in February, I scrolled to a photo of him at a long table with a few women I did not recognize. He was laughing in the way he laughed when he was performing laughter. His hand was on the shoulder of one of them, very lightly, the kind of lightly that announces itself as “lightly” on purpose. I built a small civilization around his left hand on that woman’s shoulder for the rest of the afternoon. I gave all of them names. I moved into her apartment in my head for the rest of the day, opening her kitchen drawers, looking at her mail, wondering what she kept on top of her fridge. Then I closed the app and put my phone in the freezer because I had read somewhere that this is what people do to break the compulsive checking cycle. I didn’t have the willpower for the recommended solution of “turning the phone off for thirty minutes,” which I think we can all agree is the same as death. While the phone was freezing I ate a piece of toast standing over the sink because I did not want to dirty another dish.

You can archive the thread. You can scrub the photos. You can pretend, in broad daylight, that you are an entirely reorganized woman. But at one in the morning he’s still there, lodged somewhere under your ribs where you can’t reach to dig him out, like a sound only you can hear that you forgot how to turn off.

I have a friend who got engaged in March. Her fiancé got down on one knee in a practiced way. She held her left hand out at an angle she had clearly rehearsed in the bathroom mirror before walking into the restaurant. I sat there with my wine, my fork denting the white tablecloth, thinking about all the hours of rehearsal that had gone into making this look spontaneous.

I was jealous of the posture. I was jealous of having been rehearsed for. I had been, very briefly, the whole architecture of someone’s afternoon, and then I had not been, and now I was sitting at the edge of someone else’s engagement, watching my own left hand at someone’s eight o’clock Saturday night, which was holding a glass of wine, which was not practice for anyone. The wine had a piece of cork in it. I fished it out with my finger and put it on the edge of the plate, and the plate was not mine, and I did not move the cork for the rest of the evening.

I do not wish him well.

There. I have written it down where it can be quoted back at me by anyone who finds this. I don’t really know what I wish. I just want him to stop being a thing I have to carry around. I wish he had not happened. I wish I had not been the kind of person who, at twenty-three, in a bar on the Lower East Side, looked at him and thought, with the specific arrogance of a woman who has no idea what is about to happen to her: this one.

I have been told, by a very expensive therapist I saw for most of 2022, that there is a thing called “closing the loop.” That it is possible, in theory, to lovingly withdraw one’s projection from another human being. To look at them across a room and feel, finally, neutral.

I think she was selling me something. I think we were both selling each other something, for two hundred and forty dollars an hour, and the something did not work, and now I am sitting at my own kitchen table writing about it in a way that will not, I suspect, help.

I don’t really believe in closing the loop. I think that’s just a thing they tell you so you keep coming back. You can’t close a loop you didn’t know you opened. I keep looking for the door to the room I apparently walked into years ago, and I’m starting to think there isn’t one.

My specific dislike of Tecate. My specific vulnerability to the light in October. My specific reflex to picture the inside of a stranger’s apartment when I see a particular gesture. None of this is residue. It’s the stupid literal shape of who I am now.

I have a job I am not embarrassed by. I have a cat. I have a brother who calls me when something is wrong. I have been to therapy.

None of the names fits.

I don’t know if that’s the wound or the love. I think there’s no real difference. The cat is still yelling at me from the hallway because her bowl has been empty for twenty minutes and she considers this a personal failing of mine.

The cat is looking at me from the hallway. I should feed her.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.