Erased by Emoji (Original)

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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.

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 she was bullshitting you, but after months of poking her, everything still added up. Her last name isn’t one you’ve heard before. Leah 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. Her and her sister used to have a chauffeur drive them to private school every morning.

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 fucked up smile.

And then, 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 that dream, 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 we were ride or die.

What a stupid thing to tell her about.

We hit the road in September. On the first day, at Johnson Shut-in’s, you took five 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 our 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 we’d go back and forth in the app, exchanging free gifts and trading to increase our Friendship Level. Leah said once we reached “Best Friend” status the XP boost would be huge. We played it to pass time at her friend Nick’s wedding. 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 her. That night, after the ceremony, we came home 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, her text said she thought she was over Jeff. But that she got jealous when he got a girlfriend and that it wasn’t fair to you that she’s still hung up on him. She said she needed time to sort out her emotions and that it could be a while.

She said she wouldn’t’ve kept texting him if she knew she still had feelings. She said she never intended for this to happen.

What a load of shit.

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

That girl said she’d marry you if you wanted. She 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 her work people. In fact, she said you’d met more of her friends and colleagues than Bobby ever had.

Looking back, it was like she was really pushing this shit. Sort of overselling you on how serious she was. We’d introduced the dogs and all of that junk too.

Now I’ve jumped back onto 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 shit. 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. Maybe she wasn’t the one.

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.

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 Kevin Hart had been canceled. She had an excuse. She didn’t have to come.

And today at the store you bought Wild Cherry Pepsi instead of Cherry Coke. Because — fuck you Leah.

And you don’t care anymore, you swear.

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 we’re “Ultra Friend” status! And this message pops across your screen that says Thirty Thousand XP.

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.

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, here alone on the freezing park bench, scrolling down your Pokémon friends list, you can’t help but see she’s been offline for 2+ days.

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