*TERMINATED ACCOUNT*

my favorite word combination that I definitely haven't seen more than once

The two words stared back at me, giving me a judgmental up-down for having opened a certain particular app for the hundredth time before sunset.

This stranger of the month was tall, blonde, and filling my screen to the brim with compliments. (I should’ve known.) After three and a half days of chatting and sharing *ahem* intimate thoughts on a gettin’-glitchier-by-the-minute dating platform, “TERMINATED ACCOUNT” replaced his likely made up name and thumbnail.

It happened while I was on day six of visiting my family in Kansas. Over the past couple years, I’ve discovered my sweet spot for how long I should be in close quarters with them. Three days feels like nothing, and three weeks have me ready to jump into traffic. So far, one full week has been the right cocktail; by the end, I’m definitely ready to leave, but with a good note to leave on.

So I was still having a good time. My cousin Scott and his wife Angie have recently moved nearby, and they’ve been renovating a fixer-upper lake house. For the last hour I was blissfully on their boat, old country music blending with rippling water. Scott was drinking a Coors and betting that the entire community bought at least a hundred thousand dollars worth of fireworks this fourth of July, a coat of admiration over his shaking head.

I took a picture of the view, the deep golds mixing with lilac. Then I sent it to said tall blonde stranger. A conscious mistake, sharing a sunset with someone I hadn’t met in person. But I’m a romantic. Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail will always be my aura color.

He had unintelligently but authentically responded:

killer view

I agreed, said something nonchalant about how I needed to get on more boats this summer (he was an engineer who had his own place in FiDi, I had to shoot my shot). Ten minutes later, I checked to see what he had said. My message still read as delivered. Another ten minutes, the same. Thirty minutes later, everyone was back inside and gathering fresh drinks and Trader Joe’s hummus on a sectional that threatened to swallow me. Angie’s hands were chopping through the air as she told us about Lewis and Clark, the two abandoned cats she’d discovered and saved when gutting the house. Though thoroughly interested in any stories involving cats, I was elsewhere. I hid my phone in my lap and checked my messages again.

After realizing he was gone, forever lost in the woods of Lonely and Lustful Singles, I locked my screen and shoved the stupid, cracked thing between the couch cushions. I moved my eyebrows and nodded a few times to Angie’s story, then excused myself to the bathroom so I could aggressively mouth at my reflection, WHAT THE FUCK?

Instead of simply un-matching me, he had deleted his entire existence (as I knew it) altogether.

Now, I’m going to be vulnerable here (the shock of the century) — this isn’t the first time this has happened. In March, I was talking to a man on two separate apps, because one alone could not contain our chemistry (lol). After a week of nonstop chatter, plus maybe a little bit more than chatter because I never learn, he deleted both his accounts without warning. Barely four months later, I was getting that same drop-tower-ride feeling where your stomach and heart switch places. Which, if you’re not at an amusement park, is not a super fun sensation.

There is something indescribably pathetic about feeling betrayed by a profile of a person. No one’s really entitled to each other’s time when you’re just two individuals sharing surface-level personal facts and exchanging emojis, but I felt robbed of something. Dignity? Self esteem? A couple high-quality selfies that will now remain tainted and gather pixel-y dust in my photo album?

So I revert to my usual coping mechanism, which is telling myself I’m a stupid idiot dum-dum. That no grown woman should be letting this happen. I really need to delete this app already, I say as I don’t. I rapidly flip through all the reasons why someone would abruptly disintegrate after seeming so interested and invested. Their phone got hacked, or they have a girlfriend, or their phone got hacked by their girlfriend. Or they’re just a straight cis man who gets off on flirting without consequences.

Back in the city, I was laying on my friend’s bed as she chose an outfit for a dance party we had said we’d leave for thirty minutes ago. I told her the story while she held up two almost identical tennis skirts to the mirror. She said it was love bombing, as if that were obvious. I shrugged while staring at her ceiling, playing with the pleats of my own tennis skirt. That would make sense, if it felt like love. Is horny-bombing a thing? I asked her.

Then I pretty much get over it. He was only vaguely funny, and the kind of handsome that’s boring. It was silly to have been a little excited. Next time I will not have any expectations, I say, my fingers crossing behind my back.

What was harder to get over — the last buttercream layer on top of this multiple-tiered shitcake — was the fact that this happened while I was seeing my family. Over the last seven years (ever since I started actually dating), I somehow have had a new romantic fixation every time I’ve gone home. On one hand it’s been great, because I love taking pictures of myself for validation and my parents’ guest room mirror is elite. But then it always fizzles out, or they vanish, and I remember I was smiling into my phone instead of at my dad’s jokes. Something inside of me cracks when I realize how easy it was for the idea of someone to float me away from where I should’ve been planted.

To give myself some grace, my screen time was actually decent. I mean, it wasn’t great (“I just don’t have an addictive personality!” says the me at parties that pretends I don’t scroll until my eyes burn). But for this visit, I made a real effort to take everything in. I watched my dad chop garlic and potatoes, my mom crochet coasters at the speed of light, my sister put in noise-cancelling earbuds and shut the world out. And I split open.

It was a nice break. Or as nice as a break can be when visiting one’s parents in a land-locked state versus wearing a flowing wrap dress on an Italian coast. I actually tried to remedy that by making my parents Aperol Spritzes, to which they said after taking the first sip, “huh.”

The fresh ghosting is now stale and expired. Turns out, writing about it on here — which a friend recently referred to as “like reading someone’s depressed diary” — really works for processing stuff. So Mike can suck it (also his name was Mike, like why was I even bothered?)

((sorry to any Mikes reading this))