This weekend as my Mom and I sat at a singles bar (we had no idea it was a singles bar) chatting away, drinking Noir and dishing about a life long since past, I informed her “Steve and his wife are expecting a child.”
“Oh my, really?” My Mom was overjoyed (pretty sure she wants a Grandkid really soon). Steve was one of my best friends in college; he was a rather hairy redhead man with bushy eyebrows that my Mom liked to call caterpillar brows. Mom met him on a few occasions and he always struck her as a good guy, but she knew that we had lost touch and have not actually spoken in almost six years.
“You should see him now; he isn’t the chubby little twenty year old you used to know. He has been working out, trimming his unruly hair, I might even say he is actually cute now.”
She looked at me like I was making it all up.
“I will show you.” I took out my phone, clicked on the facebook app which took forever and a year to load. I clicked photo albums and it opened to the first photo, his face was turned slightly away from the camera with a very visible frown, his wife standing next to him looking out into the distance miserable. It was probably one of the worst photos of two people in love and expecting a child ever. The app didn’t load correctly, it glitched on the photo and from one second to the next the little thumbs up icon turned blue like a pregnancy test.
“Oh my God!” I said to myself, my Mom didn’t understand what was happening. “I just liked that photo, I mean I don’t like that photo it just told him that I was on his page looking at his photos. Crap.”
Mom gave me the look, you know the one when you pop your favorite balloon and it’s dead so she has to console you but she thinks it’s really not that big a deal.
Six years I haven’t talked to this person, not by my own doing mind you… he grew up, he moved on… and now I have liked the most depressing photo of him and his wife ever.
This morning I waited for the bathroom to free up so I could take a shower and stupidly I decided to look for the photo I was going to show my Mom before. I mean I was drunkish maybe I hit the stupid little like button on accident and didn’t realize it. Man I wish that were the case.
As I looked through some really old photos a picture of him, Minna, Sarah, Darrel, Clint, my EX, and myself popped up on the screen; I haven’t spoken to any one of those people in almost seven years. I swiped the screen to move onto the next photo but nothing moved… then the tag button showed up, all the names of the people flew across the screen, then the comment button appeared, then the like button and it lit up blue. I almost puked.
My God, not only did I just like a photo of Steve’s a few days ago, but I was back on his site looking at photos from seven years ago and LIKING it. The only way it could be worse was if my freaking ex was in the photo and low and behold there he was.
I feel like slamming my face into my desk. The thought that my full name will now sprawl across my ex’s facebook, like I am whispering his name in my dreams, like I am calling him back to me, like I am not over this breakup of nearly a decade. I can’t take it back, I can’t erase what has already been liked, well I can but it still tells the person I did something on their site; I just need to stand by my facebook mishap and hope that people think I am just a weirdo, not a loser stuck in the past when we were all friends.
Thanks facebook, you did me a solid.
-ducksoup- 