I had come to expect many things through the year of my breakup. I expected to cry deeply and often, to blacklist certain songs, and to send flurries of problematic āI miss youā texts to my ex. Iām a Leo sun with a Scorpio moonĀ ā sue me.
I expected certain milestones to hurt, like the first time I saw him move on to somebody new or when a birthday passed and we didnāt spend it together. What I never expected was the intense pang of sadness I felt when I saw my ex had deleted photos of me from his Instagram feed. A strange ache reverberated through my body for days.
It seems pretty insane to type out, but the pain of this realization was sharp in a way I couldnāt liken to any other feeling Iād felt over the course of my heartbreak. First, he deleted a photo he had posted of me just a few months before we broke up. The moment I saw this was one of the first times I felt sure about our new future: it wasnāt going to magically work out when we saw each other again. Naturally, I cried for two days.
Several months later, after weād met up again, I scrolled through his feed and saw that he had deleted another picture of me, a rather ambiguous one where heād shot me from afar, standing in front of a building in Gothenburg where we were visiting briefly. Why delete this picture? What about it was so compelling, so telling of our relationship, that he had to delete it? The act of deleting felt so aggressive, somehowĀ ā so obnoxiously purposeful.
I hadnāt deleted my photos of him. I still havenāt. Does that mean Iām holding on to something that I canāt let go? I donāt think so.
I think social media provides us with this peculiar way of storytelling, and perhaps itās narcissistic, but the story is our own. I want to one day be able to look back at those odd little squares and read their stories of a time when I was 19 and 20 and 21 and in love for the first time. They hold deep connections to a memory, but they donāt necessarily signal a longing for a person. At least not for me.
Something about the mourning of deleted pictures feels like a parody of our times. Itās impossible to imagine this scenario outside of a modern, digital context. In a time when online and offline lives are rich enough to be distinguished from each other, the act of removing little pieces of evidence from this online space feels particularly jarring. A deleted photo translates into something much deeper in meaning, to the deletion of proof of our existence together.
Iād always tried to hold myself to the doctrine that one day, after the hurt had softened, Iād be able to look back on photos and relive the memories with gratitude. That Iād be able to see the soft things, the beautiful and happy things, not only the sad. Photos are potent in that way, and I hoped (and still do) to feel neither removed from this person nor bound to him. I hoped to just feel grateful, and it hurt me to think that he didnāt feel the same. That he wanted to cut me out of his memoryĀ ā even if just on social media.
Recently, my ex posted some pictures of him and his new girlfriend. I didnāt feel sad when I saw them. Maybe I felt a bit vexed, seeing that heād moved on so quickly (Leo sun, Scorpio moon, remember?), but those photos ultimately meant nothing to me. Iād made it through the worst of my heartbreak and I was alive. I was okay. Seeing him with someone new didnāt hurt me like I once thought it would. And it certainly didnāt hurt as much as his deletion of our cyber reality togetherĀ ā proof that we once existed in the same physical reality together as well.
First photo by Leo Chang and the remainder by Karen Rosetzsky.Ā