Das Bedauern

I regret ever speaking to him. The entirety of our exchange has rewired my brain chemistry forever. It’s been an unresolved loop that I doubt shall ever close completely. It was a social experiment at my own expense.

I bared pieces of my soul and shared windows into my life readily and eagerly— a rare feat. It’s not often that I mesh with a person, or feel seen-- especially with a stranger online. The earliest of it was the most splendorous, of course. It was a free trial for something unbuyable.

I came into it an entire person and made the mistake of expecting the same. While I was consumed with the girlish frenzy of hope–towards building something potent and tangible– he was fashioning a healthy leash with which to keep me tethered. He handed me just enough to quietly and passively linger; never too much to metastasize into something greater, but also not so little so as to warrant a clean death.

To him I was not a person, I was a text bubble. Deleting the app we spoke on would end my existence. I was a fun concept. Perhaps he is right to think emotional intimacy is a trap; look at where it got me.

What an unglamorous, unromantic means of communication as well. We didn’t get to know each other via letters, or spend hours chatting over the phone. He wasn’t a handsome stranger on a train with whom I enjoyed playful eye contact and banter. I was relegated to an Instagram prison and I helped to pick out my own cell.

I was trained like a dog to wake up early anticipating his messages. He was aware of our six hour time difference, but neither of us cared whether I was receiving and opening messages at 4am or not. What the hell, I thought.

I had to be up soon anyway.

I lost so much more than sleep.

I gave him my music, my thoughts, opinions, insight into my studies, my quirks, and my full attention. My world. I never show anyone that!

He responded to all of it as though it were being safely handled, and then he chucked it out of the window of a moving vehicle abruptly. Who else but me was left to try and reassemble the lost fragments?

We met on a different app (if you can call it that). Tinder, to be specific. Would’ve been a hell of an anecdote for the children. I shouldn’t have even come across him, because he was much out of my already too-large international radius. He was hours outside of the city I had set for myself. Great luck of mine.

He was the only person to show me humanity; to demonstrate a personality and humor and a willingness and ability to converse. He was witty, and sharp. I crucify myself now for being so easily swayed.

I announced my deletion of the God-forsaken app and that’s when he invited me to begin my undoing via Instagram. I have speculated for hours what his original intent may have been, and if it was always in the cards to veer so off-course. I think that would be giving him too much credit towards forethought. Emotionally vacant shells like him operate according to temporary whims and entertainment. He was in for the quick dopamine of accessing a new person without having to grant them personhood.

For a good ten minutes, it was bliss. It felt like it had finally been my turn. I let out a most harmonious exhale. I was speaking with someone who knew my language, someone who “got” me. It felt like something rare, or like something, period. I didn’t know I was even capable of feeling the ways that I did. I’d been reduced to a foolish schoolgirl; my sleep schedule was broken and I was not eating as usual. Have you ever heard of anything more pathetic?

Have you ever developed romantic emotions for a person you never met; one who seldom asked you questions about your life?

I even confessed my misguided feelings to him, which he reciprocated in the moment. Whether this was ever genuine remains a mystery to me.

As soon as it had begun, it had also started to unravel. I was continuing to come in with earnestness and hope, and he was disengaging. The already-limited replies more sparse, the frequency lessened, the urgency: gone. This was no respectable addiction, but the withdrawal just as fierce. This realization forced me to spiral.

I took the very minimal makings of this thing and alchemized them into something they would NEVER be. I told myself to never attach and then let it happen nonetheless. There wasn’t even anything to attach to in the first place. I did so much heavy lifting in the conversations, even at his most interested. I was trying to extend something unstretchable.

What was wrong with me that I played along for as long as I did? I couldn’t glue this vase back together, yet there I was forcing the pieces into unity without so much as having an adhesive in the first place.

He disembodied me; I was a temporary sideshow attraction. Even still, he kept me breadcrumbed. Anytime I would try to disengage back, he would shine glimmers of light in my direction. They were more blinding than illuminating. Having afforded me a direct line of communication or desire to end the depressing gag would’ve been too nice of him.

Anytime I took a step back, he would rematerialize with compliments, with renewed attentiveness, and then I would half-accept. It was soon just the nothing it had always been destined to. He had given me his Instagram under the pretense that we’d had good conversations, and then he deprived me of dialogue completely while dodging my inquiry into the matter.

After fizzling into months of silence, forcing me to decipher the debris I was left with, I approached him for a modicum of closure. Unsurprisingly I was met with philosophized deflection, and an ambiguous academic reference. It had all the cadence of a termination email from an employer that didn’t altogether hate me.

How tone-deaf to place culpability on a platform and not the user. Did he ever suggest platform migration, did he ever actually care? I hate Instagram. I didn’t even have it installed on my phone when we began “speaking;” I logged in through a browser.

Had I hallucinated the whole thing? Was the spark existent in only my head? What kind of person cultivates an understanding with someone and then buries it with zero funeral, zero acknowledgement?

Have I truly earned the right towards grief over something so pitiful, so hapless, that it was never truly allowed to exist? It was as much of a concept as I was. Is there a way to exorcise it from my being already? How can I pretend that it never happened, if we once spoke daily? What I mourn the most is the time lost. I can at least say that this was a learning experience, and all the other self-soothing crap people say wanting to convince themselves out of grave disappointment.

Should I thank him for the very brief, shared rush of the beginning? It is difficult to compartmentalize the vague parts of our stagnated story and much easier to scorn the entire thing.

The ambiguity is the pain. If it were an actual relationship with a name and trajectory it would be easier to damn it to hell and seek some sense of direction. It could’ve taken any shape but will never see the light of day. I don’t know what to call it by.

This stain…I hope he is haunted by the memory of me, in music I shared or references I made that he encounters in my absence. I hope my absence deafens. I know lucidly that an apology is inconceivable. Sometimes, still, I live the masochism of imagining he’d followed the script I had for him in my head.

What is clear: I am not just a voiceless tomb in an Instagram graveyard, and one day it shan’t rattle me whether he believes this or not.