I practically held hands with the plastic mouse from the family desktop as I read the words over and over: “Let’s break up.” With these three words, my summer camp romance with Caleb was through. At least he didn’t ghost me.
Each summer contained a romance. The next summer was Aaron, and after that, Rowan. We always jilted each other with final typed fingertip fights.
When I got my first laptop, I started taking the white plastic book to bed. My roommate and I brought our laptops to the dormitory bathrooms and chuckled as we instant messaged our friends with pants around ankles. I like to think I was ahead of my time; my electronics bore witness to both my love life and personal hygiene. But I was just like anyone else my age.
A few years later, I received my first smartphone. At first it mainly found a home in my back pocket, but the more I visited that three by four-inch microcosm, the more it never left my hand. I tried to put it away, but I couldn’t. That chemical pull of nonstop visual enticement pulled me in. I scrolled and clicked through the forum of faces in an online city that never slept. I made new friends.
One of my friends was Lauren. She was ten years older than me and a mother of two. We chatted often. Sometimes we commiserated and cried together, but on our best days, I know we were both laughing on either side of the screen.
One evening, she called me in distress. Her body took up space in a room five hundred miles away, with a bed, a computer, rug, blankets, pillows. Her voice took up space in my gut when she told me she’d overdosed. Her life took up space in my shaking hands when I pressed three numbers: 9–1–1.
She didn’t call the second time.
Lauren’s last message to me was, “Where is the end of this dark tunnel?” I was left with only her digital ghost: old messages of our relationship and her final moments of pain, which I share to this day. The words haunt me.
I realize someday our words and private thoughts will inhabit the digital world with the written impressions that we leave behind. Everything I type becomes words engraved on a headstone. Here lies the contradictions of humanity — and cat memes.
Tech has come a long way in a short time. There are now ghosts in all the cables, keyboards, and connections. We join the electric current and are pulled down the river of information. Those who came before make sure we never forget them.