“I want you to delete all the pictures of me,” she said.
I was sitting in the tub with my feet sticking out like two dead fish. My phone buzzed on the sink like it was having a seizure. I reached for it with my toes and eventually got it into my hand without drowning.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“You know who.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s you.”
“Yes. And I’m serious. I want every single photo of me off your phone.”
I hadn’t heard from her in three months, which was about two months longer than our entire relationship. Her name was either Chelsea or Chandler. Possibly Clarissa. The singles ad said it was one thing. She said it was another. She was allergic to tomatoes and had a tattoo of a dolphin with a quote underneath it that said Live, Laugh, Drown. That’s all I remember.
I dried off, lit a cigarette, and opened my photo gallery. There were 843 pictures in the folder labeled “Stuff.” I opened it.
She was right. There were a lot of body parts. One of her elbow. One of her ankles in wool socks. A nipple. Two more nipples, possibly from different angles. A hipbone that looked like it belonged in a museum. A single photo of a toothbrush next to mine, captioned “coexistence.” Not one single photo of her face.
I texted her back:
“After close review, none of these photos include your face.”
She responded in less than a minute:
“I don’t want even my body parts on your phone. That’s MY elbow.”
I scratched my beard. My cat, Bernard, stared at me like I had said something obscene.
I wrote:
“So what you’re saying is: my elbow pic collection is under legal review?”
“Delete them, Lance. Don’t be gross.”
“But what if I really love elbows? What if I’m building a coffee table book called The Elbow Years?”
“DELETE.”
Okay, fine. I started deleting them. The elbow. The nipple. The hipbone. The photo of us eating burritos in silence, which only featured her hand mid-guacamole lift. I deleted that one out of spite.
Then I came across the audio clip.
It was two minutes long. Just her, in bed, reading Bukowski out loud in her fake British accent. I listened. She mispronounced “drunken” as “drunkened.” I kept that one. It wasn’t a photo.
She texted again:
“Did you delete the one where I’m in the mirror wearing your shirt?”
I paused. That photo was art. The light hit her ribcage like a Caravaggio painting. You couldn’t even tell it was a woman—it was just light, and shadow, and longing. Okay, maybe also a little sideboob.
I replied:
“That one’s blurry.”
“Lance, you are emotionally blurry.”
Then she sent one final text:
“You never really saw me.”
That one hurt. But it was also technically true. In none of the photos had she ever looked at the camera.
I wanted to write something poetic, like,
“You hid your face the whole time. Maybe I only loved what you allowed to be seen.”
Instead, I wrote:
“Do you want me to delete the burrito, too?”
She didn’t reply.
_______________________________
Later that night, I sat on the floor drinking a warm Modelo, looking at Bernard. He was licking his ass with the focus of a philosopher.
I asked, “What does it mean to delete someone?”
Bernard said nothing, but his silence was profound.
I deleted the last photo: my own face in the mirror, with her blurry in the background, asleep on my bed, knees drawn up like a prayer. You couldn’t even see her. But now that I’d deleted her, it felt like the room got smaller.
I backed up the folder to a thumb drive labeled FORGOTTEN and stuck it in my sock drawer next to a broken condom and a dead Bic lighter.
She was gone. Again. Like they all go. Not with a bang, but with a request for digital erasure.
Modern love. A series of agreements and deletions.
Bernard sneezed.
I opened a new folder.
Labeled it: STUFF (AGAIN).
