Erased by Emoji (Draft 2)

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It’s not for a few paragraphs that I really drop into all of this. It’s all accurate. Even the dosage levels. When I wrote it, I still hadn’t fully grasped what had happened. Only the names have been changed. In real life Leah is named Naomi. Nick is named Matt. Jeff is named Chris. Bobby is named Tommy. Josie is named Jamie. 

So, here’s the skinny. Here you are, sitting alone on a park bench, gloveless, smearing your fingers across your phone’s screen, throwing Poke balls to catch imaginary creatures that aren’t worth anything at all. You keep playing after she dumps you, even though she’s the one who got you into this dumbass game in the first place.

After matching on Hinge, on your first date, you made a trade. Leah gave you acid. You gave her mushrooms. And a week later she was in your house guiding you through your first Tim Leary experience. Unfolding foil. Tearing off colored paper squares smaller than an Advil. The paper turning to mush on your tongue. You swallowed. And the next thing you knew, nobody had any clothes on.

Leah left a seven-hundred-dollar Breville espresso machine at your place. You still use it. So does Josie, but she doesn’t know it’s not yours. 

And she left a Monty Python DVD box set given to her as a birthday present by her father, who still lives in Cypress after being nailed by the FBI in the center of a global money laundering scheme.

The largest bust in Belgian history. At first you thought Leah was bullshitting you, but after months of poking her, everything still added up. Her last name isn’t one you’ve heard before. She pulled up his Wikipedia page. He has an entire chapter of a book written about him, but it’s not in a language you can read.

And she left a stack of hard-drives full of Belgian TV shows and pirated movies on your coffee table. She said her dad sent them to her. You still haven’t looked to see what’s on them. In some ways it kinda creeps you out.

Why she would leave all of this at your place in the weeks leading up to this, you have no idea.

Leah’s no idiot. In high school she scored the highest in all of Cypress on the standardized test for English. You were smoking in her basement when she brought out her memory box and unfolded the newspaper article. She had no accent. She could fluently speak Flemish, Greek, French, English, and Dutch. Only one of these are useful here in the U-S-of-A. Her and her sister used to have a chauffeur drive them to private school every morning. It all sounded very cute.

Leah told you she loved you. But she didn’t say it first. Big mistake. And maybe, the first time she stayed over, she was right when she asked if things really could be this good or if it was just the acid.

Natural Born Killers has a baby with True Romance. That was us.

You told her about a dream you had. At that point the two of you had probably eaten at least half a blotter sheet together. She was faceless and weaving through a crowd. You tried to keep up with her. She kept moving. Strangers would come up to you — whispering in your ear that she doesn’t really love you. That she does this with every guy. That Leah fucks with your emotions and then bounces as soon as she has you hooked.

You say, “Shut up.” You yell that they’re lying. And that’s when she stops running. She stands there with all these nameless people passing us by. This time her face looks like someone else. And tears roll down her cheeks and her head sinks. You rub your hand over her back, but she starts laughing. Her face grins ear-to-ear with this wacky smile.

In the dream, she says it’s true, “I don’t love you.” She laughs some more, turns her back to you, and runs away, vanishing into the ocean of people.

That night, after you told Leah about her vanishing, she said she’d never leave you for anything in the world. She played I’ll Never Do You Wrong by Joe Tex. She said this was ride or die.

What a stupid thing to tell her about.

You hit the road together in September. On the first day, at Johnson Shut-in’s, you took five Super Mario tabs and she took eight. All the pools of blue spring water and rippling falls and smooth quartz and flint stones melted together in a dazzling spectacle, rolling into one ball of energy as we laid out on the sandbar. Just like Adam and Eve, falling in love with the purple highways and billboards.

The next day we drove to Branson. Again, taking more tabs, we stopped at a five and dime. Underneath a sign that says THIS IS AN EXPENSE CONTROL BUSINESS sits a row of exotic soda. Ranch Dressing Soda. Buffalo Wing Soda. Enchilada Soda. We couldn’t find Cigarette Soda. But there were balloon-powered wooden boats and screaming rubber chickens and clown masks and motorized bubble blowing guns.

Leah liked to make her own jewelry. You watched her thumb through trinkets and crystals at a little corner shop. When you asked her what stones she liked she pushed a bead tray shut, gazed through her bangs, and said, “Nothing shiny. Anything but a diamond. I’ll never wear a diamond again.”

We saw fire fountains. We saw magicians. We saw the Ozark Mountains. We saw our future together.

On the last night at the resort she had her first fart in front of you. You were sneaking into the hot tub after hours and she was trying to hold in her laughter. The staff closing up definitely heard it.

It wasn’t long after that that you’d downloaded Pokemon Go. Each day going back and forth in the app, exchanging free gifts and trading to increase Friendship Levels. Leah said once you’d both reached “Best Friend” status the XP boost would be huge. The two of you must have spent at least half of the reception dinner at Nick’s wedding trading your catches. She said Nick used to be her work husband. And she kept saying how horrible the girl he was marrying was.

The wedding weekend was the last time you saw Leah. That night, after the ceremony, you both went back to your place and changed into couch clothes. And Leah had you take some standardized online test for childhood trauma. You scored a four out of ten. She told you her score was nine out of ten. She said she thinks that’s why she likes working at the children’s mental hospital. It just gives her so much adrenaline.

When you brought up moving in she smiled and said, “But you don’t even know me,” and rolled her eyes and looked back at you, flicked the ash from her cigarette and said, “I can be a crazy bitch.”

When Leah broke things off, the text said she thought she was over Jeff. It seemed the levels of jealousy and insecurity had spilled over the top when he got a new girlfriend. It wasn’t fair to you that she’s still hung up on him. She needed time to sort out her emotions and said that it could be a while.

Events according to Leah: She wouldn’t’ve kept texting him if she knew she still had feelings. She never intended for this to happen. In theory.

This is what getting wrecked feels like. But at least she did it before her birthday, so you didn’t waste your surprise Chris Rock tickets on her.

That girl said she’d marry you if you wanted. Leah finalized her divorce papers with Bobby Staubach for you. It so happened that Bobby was the only person you’d ever full-blown punched in middle school. In a city of half a million people, where she moved here from Belgium for him, what are the odds? Her friends kept saying it meant it was kismet. You’d met Leah’s work people. In fact, she said you’d met more of her friends and colleagues than Bobby ever had.

Looking back, it was like Leah was really pushing all of this. Sort of overselling you on how serious she was. You’d introduced the dogs and all of that junk too. It felt like Bobby finally got his chance to punch you back.

Now I’ve jumped back into dating apps. Swiping right to Like, swiping left for Nope. Swiping left a lot more. I’d tell you what the stereotype is for a left swipe, but then, to some of you, I’d just seem like an asshole.

Kill me. Don’t get me wrong, I bet guy profile stereotypes are just as bad. But that’s the thing about Leah though. She liked weird cult movies. We had the same sense of humor. We agreed on politics. We liked a lot of the same bands. Each conversation was its own little mystery box. For the first time in forever you’d found someone with an interior that wasn’t painted in neutral Benjamin Moore. 

“You really dodged a bullet.” That’s the first thing everyone tells you. Some of your friends say she wants a guy who treats her like garbage. If that’s true, then maybe you can’t be with her. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe she’s fully capable of love. And, maybe, you’re just scrambling to slap a bandaid over a fresh cut. 

We follow each other on Spotify. What if she saw me listen to Just a Friend by Biz Markie. Fuck.

Josie stayed the night last week. You two actually have great chemistry. And you’d wanted to ask her out since college. She’s funny and likes UFOs and paranormal stuff — just like you do. And you already know she’s not as crazy as Gary Busey in a woman’s body. So, that’s nice.

Back in college, Josie would have definitely been a right swipe for you. But instead she said, “Please don’t do that,” after your hand found itself on her ass at the dance club. With your face red from whiskey and embarrassment, you bought her drinks all night. Josie dated your former roommate and you ended up dating her current roommate. 

You didn’t ask her out for fourteen years, making sure you’d fully sobered up. It ends up she doesn’t remember your hand doing that. Josie winks and says, “How clever of you to erase the mistake from my memory.”

And now you’ve finally lost all the weight and quit the booze and aren’t a chain-smoking, slobbering, total alcoholic. And you’ve got a good career and a house and everything like that. And Josie’s as hot as a microwave oven.

And she drove over an hour each way to see you even though you’d already let her know that Chris Rock had been canceled. She had an excuse. She didn’t have to come. 

FYI — Chris Rock is really Kevin Hart.

And today at the store you bought Wild Cherry Pepsi instead of Cherry Coke. Because — fuck you, Leah. Josie doesn’t speak any languages. Josie isn’t some fancy show-off, too full of herself to see the trees in the forest.

And you don’t care anymore, you swear. If only you could find anywhere to get more LSD. You’ll never look at tin foil the same way again.

Less than a week after she ended it, Leah sent you a Pokémon gift. You scratched your head over what it meant. She hadn’t sent any texts. She’d know when you opened it, so you didn’t touch it until hump day.

But you sure as hell weren’t quitting something you liked because of her. You kept playing. She’d see you’re active. But, finally, you cave. And when you open the box — BAM! Now you’re “Ultra Friend” status! And this message pops across your screen that says Thirty Thousand XP.

Not even two weeks after Leah ended things, right before the family Thanksgiving trip to Nashville, the same trip Leah was supposed to go on, you came across her re-activated Tinder profile. You pinched your fingers and zoomed in on her photo. Her smiling face, snug next to yours, but yours erased by emoji.

And, there alone on the freezing park bench, scrolling down your Pokémon friends list, you couldn’t help but see Leah’d been offline for 2+ days.

And when you’re laying there with Josie’s head on your chest, every joke you make seems like the funniest thing in the world to her. But all that laughter scares the hell out of you. Because you don’t know if any day now you won’t be her favorite comedian anymore.

Sometime after the new year you tapped Leah about getting your stuff back. She never answered. You double texted, rattling off that you’ll get her crap back to her too. You didn’t call it crap though. You were nice. Maybe, if you were nice enough, she’d at least hook you up with more tabs. But you got back crickets. It really threw you through a loop. Her stuff was nicer than yours.

Spring popped in and you rolled the mower out from the garage. Your neighbor, a mental health counselor at a different facility than Leah’s, happened to be on her driveway. You struck up a conversation. You know the kind, just the sort of friendly bs-ing about the weather. She turns to walk away, then jerks her head back and asks you for the low down on the “big ordeal with that girl you used to date.”

You blink. You tilt your head with unawareness. 

“Oh my God, you don’t know?” She asks, covering her mouth with the tips of her fingers. “That girl let some sort of drug slip from her purse. It was a disaster.”

The security footage showed Leah marching down the hall to start her shift, clutching her phone, throwing poke balls at imaginary creatures not worth anything at all. She pulled the strap of her purse up over her shoulder and out dropped a folded piece of tin foil onto the hallway tile.

One minute you think you know a person. You think they’d never crush you. The next thing you know, they’ve morphed into something else you’ve never seen before. One minute a kid’s calm and controlled. The next he’s ripping arteries out of an orderly’s neck with his teeth. Spraying blood and saliva across the pastel wallpaper. Screaming something, over and over. Something about Super Mario. 

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This story has been edited from its original version per Chuck Palahniuk’s feedback. To read Chuck’s input on this piece,click here. If you would like to read the first draft,click here.