Deleted, But Not Erased

I went to visit Bonnie today.
Not at her grave.
Not in some dusty photo album that smells like old paper and forgotten time.
I went to her Facebook page.

Like I’ve done a hundred times before,
just to see her name in that familiar font,
just to pretend for a second
that time hasn’t done what time does.

But it’s gone.
Deleted.
Like a light switch flipped off in an empty room.
Like she was never here.

Grief, for me, looks like texting my iPad
because Bonnie’s Facebook is gone—
deleted like the last thread that held me together.
Her number?
It rings in someone else’s pocket now.

I’ve already reread all our messages—
every joke, every “you got this,” every inside reference.
She was my editor before the editor,
catching my typos with a teasing, “You’re better than this,”
pushing me past the easy words,
telling me, “This part is good, but you can go deeper.”
She never let me play small.

Now, even those messages are gone.
I thought I’d have them forever,
like a stack of letters folded neatly in a shoebox,
waiting to be opened when I missed her most.
But grief doesn’t let you keep things.

It looks like sending a meme at 1:11 a.m.,
a “good morning” voice note at 7:06,
a long text at 6:27 p.m.—
watching each message flicker
from “delivered” to “read”
not because she’s alive,
but because I’m basically talking to myself.

These texts go nowhere.
But I send them anyway.
Like tossing notes into the ocean,
hoping maybe Heaven has a newsfeed.

I write my ache into these apps,
where people scroll past pain like it’s content.
Where grief becomes engagement.
Where honesty only gets “likes”
if it’s in the photo caption of a pair of tiddies.

I crave connection—
real, ragged, late-night I see you connection.
But I loathe
the curated theater of digital belonging.

Because none of it fills the space she left.
None of it hands me back her laugh,
her proofreader’s pen,
her steady faith that I could go deeper.

And yet, I’m not left empty.
Memories stay behind—
a gift and a curse.
They bring her back:
the way she left cat hairs in my passenger seat,
signed every message with an otter and a heart, never hassled me about being late,
the way she saw me even when I couldn’t see myself.
But only to remind me she’s gone.

And making new friends in your 40s
feels like trying to heat a home
on Lakeshore Drive in January
with just a candle and a memory—
a warm memory of a Deep Ellum stroll
on an August night.

Bonnie’s gone
and now I’m in a Sisyphean struggle
with grief, time, and loneliness

So I write.
Because if I can’t hear her voice,
I can at least let mine carry the parts of her
I refuse to forget.
The jokes, the wisdom, the echoes of her belief in me.
She used to proofread my words,
but now, writing about her is how I hold on.

What wounds me deeper than missing the dead
is whispering to the living
and getting silence back.

The “social” in social media
don’t feel like socializing anymore—
it feels more like strategizing.

There are versions of me
that only existed in her presence.
Versions of me realized only because she was here.
And if I stop speaking her name,
if I stop telling our stories,
then I lose those parts of me too.

I still think about texting her.
Still wonder what she’d say if I could.

Maybe that’s enough.
Maybe memory is its own kind of forever.