I saw you in my feed on social media. You dated my housemate for a very long time. I met you twice--once at the second house I lived in with him, once on your porch in Boston when I had an allergic reaction to something in the air and he kept wondering if it was your dog. It wasn’t your dog. You married somebody else, which is good, because he used to cheat on you. He tried to with me. He did with a friend of mine. She didn’t know you existed, she felt so angry, and I felt so sorry that she didn’t know and that she has to know that now. You have a new dog now, not the one from the porch, which he got to keep when you moved out. He wound up living with our other housemate from senior year and their life together was just like that again, video games very loud, a beautiful bong on the desk at all times, ordering food from regular spots and laughing about videos and movies. I don’t really know where you live, but I watched you renovate a van. I saw posts about your engagement, your new dog, your marriage, your new life. You are really, sincerely happy. You say so.
I was thinking about how long I’ve followed you on instagram. And how did that even come to be? I met you twice. And why are you still here? for me, I mean. Why are you still on my instagram feed? And I think about the people I don’t follow now, whose lives I know nothing about. people who were in my life for years. I knew some of them very well. I knew some of them too well to keep in touch with. And now I don’t know them at all, only this version of them that only lives in my memory of who they were. And me, too, they have some version of me that I will never know, a version of myself I never knew that they invented and hold on to. Just like you. Just like me with you.
It is encouraging to see you so happy, to see anybody happy, so I still look at whatever it is you post about your lovely life. And I am happy, too. And I don’t talk to your ex boyfriend and my ex roommate anymore, and I used to be mad about it, but now I don’t really care. He is living his own life now too that I don’t know anything about. And we used to live together and so many things happened. Some of it so lovely. Some of it so horrible. Even then there was so much I never knew about him, and you, too. Even then there was so much you never knew about him. Even then, two years, two different houses, two different housemates I confessed his crimes to in the middle of some drunk and serious chat shook their heads with disbelief because they didn’t know. “No, I don’t want to hear this,” and later “god damn, I can’t believe this.” And I had to tell somebody, but I never really did, not all of it. And I still loved living with him, even. And now I don’t know him at all.
If I had met you more than twice, if there was some reason we had a connection on social media beyond somebody sending somebody a request, if we had some trace of a friendship even by circumstance, perhaps I would have told you about a certain morning, a certain evening, about my poor friend who didn’t know, about any of it, about how not even our other housemate knew--the one you knew, how he didn’t even know, not until I told him. But it would never be my place to tell you that. Not for me to tell you.
theartofmadeline
2087
stormborns
prguitarman
areudirty
janainaart
