Several years ago, I told a story at an ex-themed storytelling show at The Bitter End. It was long and it was rambly and it was mainly told out of revenge. (To be fair, the ex in question was responsible for this story.)

My girlfriend at the time, Amy, was in the audience. I remember us having tense drinks after that show. I learned two things that night. One, don’t tell a story for revenge. Two, don’t go into that much detail about another woman in front of your girlfriend.

Amy ended up breaking my heart a couple of years later and that break-up took on mythical status in my mind. She ended our four-year relationship over the phone. It was abrupt and, to date, the most disrespectful thing that anyone has ever done to me.

I pored over the details of that relationship and that breakup for years in therapy, in journal entries, in my own head, just trying to make sense of what happened. How could I have not seen it coming? What did I miss? What is wrong with me?

That relationship still remains my white whale, the cold case I never solved. In my mind’s eye, I have a conspiracy theorist cork board covered in crisscrossing red yarn connecting timelines, black and white pictures, and newspaper clippings.

But years passed and the obsession faded.

Then, last summer, I saw an article of hers that she posted on LinkedIn (we had long since disconnected everywhere else, but I had forgotten LinkedIn because, well, it’s LinkedIn). I reached out. We got coffee and I ended up learning a third thing: exes are exes for a reason. When you have a scar, you don’t need to cut it open again just to make sure it healed.

I poked the bear, didn’t let the sleeping dog lie, etc. I got a stark reminder that this was a woman who held me in such low regard that she dumped me over the phone faster that you can cancel Spectrum.

So, I went back to an old essay about our relationship and started writing again. The working title was “How Much Fun It Was Just Knowing Her,” from the quote at the end of Annie Hall where Alvy reflects fondly on his time with Annie. My oh so witty take on it was that nothing about my relationship with Amy was fun, not even years later. That the notion of “don’t be sad it ended, be glad it happened” was bullshit. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t.

The essay swelled and swelled and swelled. I delved into every detail, ever bitter thought I ever had. It had no point and none was emerging.

It was long and it was rambly and it was mainly told out of revenge.

When I reached out to her, I told myself that it was a gesture of friendship but that’s a lie. I wanted to change the past. I thought that there would be some validation in being on better terms. I could tell myself that I hadn’t wasted four years of my life.

Anyway, you are reading what remains of that long, rambling essay. I realized, though, that I had two pieces written about the breakup that weren’t half bad and weren’t crazy bitter and angry and I that I had never shared them.

Below is an attempt at a Modern Love essay. I wrote it in 2018 or 19 so I call out some time specific issues where necessary. I got the title from this Mighty Mighty Bosstones song that I still think holds up. Below that is a recording of a story I told about her on stage.

It’s time to take the push pins out of the cork board, roll up the red yarn, and throw the notecards away. The case is a dead end.

Pictures to Prove It

The day after my ex-girlfriend dumped me over the phone, I got one of those videos for our four year friendversary on Facebook [Ed: they used to have those]. You know the one. It gives you a little slideshow of your pictures together. Then it gives you some stats. You liked each other’s statuses X number of times. It ends with, “You seem like you like each other a lot.”

I hate pictures of myself. I can’t smile on command. I don’t like the shape of my face when I smile. I don’t like seeing my crowded off-white teeth and since I started losing my hair [Ed: at the time of the writing, “losing” was still present tense] I took to tilting my head back in pictures to de-emphasize it giving me the posture of someone with indigestion and a back injury.

But in the self-pitying months that followed, after the gut punch of the break-up, I looked to those pictures for proof that our relationship actually happened.

There were two pictures in particular.

The first was a picture of us in a bar in the East Village where her mother was playing some music. I forget who snapped this picture but it’s pretty candid. We aren’t even looking at the camera. We’re looking at each other. She’s smiling at me. I’m smiling at her. It’s a natural, joyful smile. I don’t even mind how my face looks in it. My hand is on her hip. Her hand is on my shoulder. We look happy.

That night, I was introduced to family friends—a mother and daughter. I wasn’t there to see it but apparently, after seeing how my girlfriend and I were together, the daughter said to her mother, “I want that.” Her mother replied, “Sweetie, everybody wants that.”

The second picture is of us on her birthday, her first after we started dating. We were ice skating in Prospect Park. We asked someone to take the picture for us. I’m wearing a black leather jacket and a red scarf. She’s wearing a gray wool jacket. My arm is around her back. Her hand is on my chest. We were beaming.

I would look at those pictures and think, Jesus, those people look happy.

I didn’t realize how many pictures we took together until I got dumped. We took those braggy, we’re out on a date having fun and you aren’t kind of pictures that happy couples take in the beginning. We took selfies during holidays, birthdays, valentines, New Years, at rooftop parties, in bars. There were pictures of us with her friends, pictures of us with my friends. A post breakup scroll through my photos was like a heartbreak flipbook. After a while, I decided to stay away.

Facebook had other plans. I kept getting those daily memory reminders and they all featured my ex.

I suppose it’s kind of comforting that for all of its data collection, Facebook’s algorithm is still not sophisticated enough to know when you’ve been dumped. On the other hand, I didn’t need Facebook in my life like some senile relative.

You and Amy went to that beer garden in Carroll Gardens, do you remember that?

Yeah, Facebook, but we broke up.

Do you remember Amy’s childhood friend’s wedding in Vermont?

Yeah, Facebook, but we broke up.

You two were biking in Italy…

Facebook! We. Broke. Up.

She posted rarely but if she did anything on social media, she was at the top of my feed. I tried unfollowing her so I just wouldn’t see anything but that didn’t prevent the occasional cyber stalking, trying to suss out any clues as to why I was dumped including, but not limited to, current activities and social activity partners. 

So, I unfriended her. Unfortunately, her friends and family that I had friended through her still posted, occasionally leaving clues about her, clues that I did not want to see.

And still, the memories kept coming.

A year ago, you were at the Shakespeare and Company in Paris.

Yeah, I know that, Facebook.

I just couldn’t take the reminders anymore. So, I made a move more befitting a seventh grader than a grown man. I unfriended her and everyone I knew through her. Was it petty? Yeah. Was it necessary? Yeah.

But even with the unfriending, the reminders kept coming.

A year ago, you and Amy went to a beer hall together. Two years ago, you and Amy were happy. Do you remember that, Rob? Remember?

So, I started untagging myself from her pictures and deleting mine. One at a time. The side effect of course was that I had to revisit every picture.

I started at the top, in reverse chronological order. There was a group of us at a restaurant and she was sitting next to her roommate instead of me. There was Christmas in my hometown, in a bar with my friends, watching soccer, an activity she hated. The previous Thanksgiving where we split time between our families and the travel really drained her. 

Untag. Delete. Untag. Delete.

Our fall trip to Paris. Her back is turned to me in front of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. We’re in Portland, Oregon, holding up Voodoo Donuts. We’re in the Brooklyn Botanical gardens during the cherry blossoms. We’re next to the water by her family’s place in Maine.

Untag. Delete. Untag. Delete.

All the while, I’m looking for the clues. Is her smile less bright in any of these? Was she faking it there?

After looking so closely at her, I couldn’t help but also look at myself. 

I noticed that in pictures where I have my arm around her I’m holding her upper arm right above the elbow almost like I’m gripping her. I wasn’t possessive but I certainly held on tightly to the relationship. I texted her all the time. I kept track of how many months we were dating long after we passed twelve. I wanted her to like the same things that I did, the same movies, the same sports. I had a picture in my mind of this perfect couple and I was upset whenever the reality didn’t match. 

In other pictures, I came to hate my close-lipped smile that looked more and more to me like a smirk. It was the smirk of a person arrogant enough to think that his relationship was permanent and that no matter how he behaved, no matter how anxious he was or dissatisfied with his life, that his girlfriend couldn’t possibly ever leave.

Untag. Delete. Untag. Delete.

I pressed on, making my way back in time towards the beginning. I found those two pictures of us in the East Village Bar, of us ice skating. The proof.

Untag. Those were the hardest to delete.

It’s been over a year [Ed: again, 2018/19, now it’s around seven years] since I had any electronic connection to her. It’s been longer since we spoke.

At the beginning of the year, I went to the Verizon store for a new phone. I’d had an iPhone SE [Ed: the technology references are also quite old] for far too long. The selfie camera was foggy, and the memory was tiny. I often had to delete apps just to receive emails.

I decided to get an iPhone X, with the facial recognition technology and a perfect camera and lots of room for pictures and apps. When I got the new phone, they transferred all of my data, my contacts and all of my preferences. The one thing that didn’t make it was all of my texts but I was cool with that. It was time for a fresh start.

The woman said, “We’ll see if it transfers your photos.” It wasn’t a big deal, I’d had so few because they couldn’t fit.

“Oh, it looks like they are,” she showed me on the screen how all of these pictures were downloading. It was downloading the few pictures from my phone but also a lot of pictures that I had somehow saved to the cloud. They were all downloading to the new phone.

I immediately got a notification of memories from my phone from 2015 and there she was again. It was like I couldn’t get away from her, the new iPhone a cruel frat bro to Facebook’s senile relative.

Bro, this your ex?

Yes, iPhone, yes it is.

The picture for my memories from 2015 was a picture of her resting her chin on the heel of her hand, smiling at me across a café table in Rome.

I remember that day. It was a week or so into our “Italy Adventure” as she labeled the album in Facebook. It was a pleasant, warm afternoon. We’d already been to the Coliseum and seen ruins a day before, we were just wandering through the city that day, something that we both loved to do. And we just wanted to stop and get a drink and a little something to eat.

It was a good trip.

I Don’t Want to Learn Anything

I wrote a lot about her. She never wrote a damn thing about me. It’s kind of humiliating when you realize that someone is a major character in your life and you’re scarcely a footnote in theirs.

Funny enough, Amy and I met in a storytelling class. I remember the first day there was some confusion over who had signed up for the last spot. It was between Amy and another young woman. The teacher looked at the class list and said, “It looks like Amy got the last spot.”

The other woman got her things and left.

Amy and I were this close to never having met at all.

I think about that sometimes.