In Memory Of

the internet has held on to my memories for me, even if I don't want them

I came across the memory by accident; I was searching my old tumblr archives for a picture of my daughter when I stumbled upon a post I wrote about how happy I was, how my relationship was thriving and how I felt secure and at peace for the first time in years. It was a jolt given that we’re separated now, but it’s a jolt I’ve become accustomed to. Not only does the internet never forget, it never lets you forget, either.

I look on my flickr account for images to use in my newsletter and he’s there, he’s everywhere. He’s smiling in Barcelona, walking in Memphis, standing on a beach in California. There’s the one of him eating cotton candy in Disneyland, the one of him looking handsome and pensive at the Faith No More show. I go back and look at all the essays I’ve published and there I am praising his sobriety, talking about healthy relationships, reliving poignant moments in our life together. And there he is in a tweet where I’m making fun of him for thinking everything I listen to is My Chemical Romance. Our wedding photos, that one picture of us on our honeymoon blissfully unaware of the road ahead of us. He’s unavoidable.

If you’ve been on the internet long enough and you’re active enough on it, you’ve probably left a trail of memories, too. Mine have come back to haunt me. They lurk in every corner of my online life; the past seeps into my now, it pushes up at the edges of my attempts at happiness, corners me just when I’m feeling okay. I spend a lot of time online, I’ve been consistent about documenting my entire life in this space since I started blogging in 2001. Give me one minute’s time and I can find any anecdote about my life you’re looking for, about my kids, my last marriage, my feelings about war, my job, my family. It’s all there in words and pictures, spread out among three blogs, a tumblr account, twitter, Facebook, Medium, and here in this newsletter.

Sometimes I come across the pictures and essays inadvertently while looking for something else. Sometimes I torture myself and go looking for them. Either way they are always there, because the internet is a Trapper Keeper of sorts, a collection of the detritus of my life being held for safekeeping. In many ways, I’m glad it’s all here where I can easily access my memories, give life to the thoughts in my head. But in more ways, it’s become disruptive to my attempts to build a life for myself after separation. I find myself on flickr often, going through the album that carries his name, rifling through our vacation photos, looking at him lying on the couch with our dogs, a representation of all that was good in our lives. I look and I remember, I mourn, I cry. I purposefully go through certain years of archives on my tumblr, the hundreds of pictures of him and us, the random stories I told about him because he made me laugh so often. When I get sad and think about our better days, they are all there for me, laid bare on the internet.

There are occasions when I want to forget, when I am struggling to move on and don’t need reminders of everything that vanished from our lives. But I can’t. I can’t forget because it’s embedded in my reality, it’s always there at my fingertips, waiting for me to give in and look: look at us in Chicago. Look at him planting flowers in our yard. Look at us in an apparent state of bliss outside a Reno wedding chapel. There is no ceremoniously burning photos or throwing out letters, because I chose to document everything in bits and bytes and they’re always here at my call, even on the days I don’t want them to be here. I can’t scrub all those websites of my presence and even if I could, I wouldn’t. Sometimes I need to look. Sometimes I need to be reminded of what once was. We were happy, we were laughing, we were together, and I have proof of that. That proof is all I have to hang on to right now.

Coming upon this stuff by chance is when it hurts the most. When I’m searching for an essay I wrote about anxiety and come across one I wrote about him, about us, it hits like a hamner. When I’m looking for old pictures of the dogs on tumblr and there he suddenly appears, smiling at me from across a restaurant table, so patient with my always wanting to take pictures of him, that’s when the heartache reappears. I don’t regret putting the details of my life out there for years, I just wish for the unsolicited reminders of happiness to go away.

The internet is forever, even if the things it documents aren’t.