On Facebook and Love.

On the first date, we met at the West End Tavern and drank black beer and bourbon.  It was drafty upstairs and the band was too loud. We sat in the poorly-lit corner by the shuffleboard.  I pulled my shirt down to let him feel my scar; he slid his off to show me the tattoo—a  monkey wrench, red and blue, on his shoulder. We laughed endlessly. His leg, hard with muscle, pressed against mine.

We went back to my place and fucked, in honor of Ed Abbey.  He held my short hair in his hands as he kissed me.

“You better call, mister,” I said.

“You better pick up,” he said.

On the second date he brought his dog over to my tiny second-floor apartment and I made him yellow curry. The place was the kind of clean that only happens on second dates. He was less funny. I liked him anyway.  I turned petting the dog into petting him. Afterward, he lay in bed, squinting happily at my bookshelf.

That night, we became friends on Facebook.

I’ve got a walk-in closet of reasons I love Facebook. They’re hedgy, of course. They exist only in defense. Activism, community poetry, networking—and to know what my friends from seventh grade church camp are doing on a daily basis. There’s a delicious vengeance in watching the cutest cheerleaders from high school get fat on beer and drop out of community college. But the real, true joy of Facebook, if you strip it all down, is exactly what it looks like: legal stalking, in the comfort of your own home.

What I’m making clear, here, is that by the third date I had absolutely for-sure established the existence of the ex. Not just any ex, but a pictures-were-tagged-just-a-month-ago ex. A traveled-together-by-plane ex. A visted-family ex. A blonde, Naropa-poetry-slam-reading, tight-assed-doing-yoga-atop-Fourtneers ex.

I bristled.

On the third date we met at my favorite coffeeshop. It was late afternoon and the sun twisted through the glass windows onto the table. Outside snow softened on the curbs. He wore a maroon Carhartt jacket that made me want to eat him and I was nervous. Something was different. Maybe he thought poorly of my 1,000 Facebook Friends. Or the 1,500 pictures tagged of me at all stages of fat, hippie, dying, and making out with my ex.

We drank chai. He wanted to talk about her. I wasn’t surprised but my heart yammered against my underwire. It was only a month ago. (I know.)  She was the only person he knew in this town. (Oh shit.) She was his next-door neighbor (his fucking next-door neighbor?!). 

“I wondered,” I said, the paragon of calm. “I saw her in your Great Sand Dunes album. Those pictures were beautiful.”

He assessed me, smiling a little, brown eyes, brown freckles, slightly gapped smile. (MBA from Cornell!, I kept thinking, Sustainability Consultant! Camps naked!) 

“Are you, like, one of those creepy Facebook stalkers?” he asked.

Pause.

“No way,” I said, “I just look when I friend someone for the first time. You know, out of curiosity. But… not much after.”

I went home and looked her up. She was a writer too. She even spelled her name with a fucking i at the end like mine. We had a friend in common, someone pretentious and image-based (read: smart and beautiful and terribly nice) whom I’d gone to college with. Oh fuck you, I thought, flipping through as many of her pictures as Facebook would let me see and wishing I had an ass like that.

On the fourth date, I packed my MSR stove and a box of mac ’n’ cheese and a few beers into the cooler and drove to the San Luis Valley. I was nervous as hell. He’d gone camping alone and I was coming to meet him. I’d pictured sleeping in the back of his truck on that old mattress, the way she had; winter sex, the tangle of sleeping bags, his brown lab smooshed in there somewhere too.  I’d pictured a fire, the two of us sipping Jameson and reading nature writers. Or kissing in the hot springs. Disappearing into the steam. Maybe falling in love.

Instead he took me on a walk up to the old mine and shot a roll of film in the dying light. Beautiful photos, not an ounce of me in any of them. He told me every word of mine was out of her blonde mouth, that we were just exactly alike, that it was a little too much.  “Stop it,” he said, when I told him I loved trains, “this is getting really weird.” 

I held myself tight against the cold. Was I? Was I exactly someone else?

We cooked two separate dinners at two separate picnic tables.  After, when I leaned toward him at the fire, he paled, jolted.  “Am I allowed to kiss you?” I said.

“I’m not ready,” he said weakly, “I’m not ready, I’m sorry, you’re wonderful, you’re so beautiful, I’m sorry.”

I drove home in the middle of the night rather than pitch my own tent. It was blizzarding on the pass.

At home, delirious, I stared at their pictures on Facebook and cried.  The man had been miserable, sitting there by the fire, lonely and lost. He was already in love. He probably let the dog out into a shared yard each morning, searching the windows for a glimpse of her hair. He’d gone home with a stranger because she fit so precisely into the shadow of his heart.

Sometime after dawn he unfriended me, and it all disappeared.