Hey.
It’s Me.
Look, I’m not calling to rehash anything. I realize it’s over. I’m just calling to tell you that I’m deleting you. I’m blocking you on Facebook, I erased your texts from my phone, and I have every intention of unfollowing you on Instagram just as soon as you stop posting cute pictures of my cat. It unnerves me to no end that she is caught up in all of this.
Now that you're out of the picture, I have to actually take you out of all my online pictures, which is no small feat. You were all UP in my phone and I don’t want anyone making the mistake that you are the person to call in case of emergency; if my phone were lost, or if I were hit by a truck while text-walking, like you always tell me not to….
Oh you'd like that, wouldn’t you? A real told-you-so sort of accident.
Well, if I land myself in the hospital due to phone-related injuries, I don't want to wake up to you hovering over my bed. Maybe I’ll get lucky and lose my memory altogether and straight up eternal-sunshine you out of my MIND. If I do get amnesia and have to relearn people’s faces from blurry party pics on Facebook, I will not be re-learning your face (or your breasts as I deleted all of those photos as well).
It wasn’t easy! It’s not like I could go back and just throw away a box of letters. Your digital debris is everywhere: stuck to my search engine, embedded in the list of movies we would have watched together. The four stars you gave that French new wave film on Netflix continue to haunt my recommended movies algorithm. I erased the bookmarks for the blogs you like to read every morning, even before your feet had touched the floor. The live recording you downloaded from the concert I took you to for your birthday, where you swore you could hear me screaming at the stage for an encore, is no more. I have scrubbed it all.
The one thing I can’t seem to figure out is how to remove your name from the autofill on my email account. Every time I type an ‘a’ into the recipient line, just that one letter convinces my computer to fill in your full name, certain I will be sending another midnight poem or YouTube link intended to make you laugh. The damn machine doesn’t forget anything!
But I guess that’s the problem.
There are some things we just cannot erase.
Please delete this message.
Cara Rose DeFabio is a pop addicted, emoji fluent, transmedia artist, focusing on live events as an experience designer for Real Future.