I didn’t want to blaze through this at some rapid speed. Instead I wanted to take the time to really think about each post and then go back and edit later. However now that this is being broadcast, I feel compelled to hurry up and post the rest. Another friend had reached out with the suggestion I call her Amy which seems fair as once again, this was intended to be anonymous. I will slowly be switching the name as I go.

October 2020 – had been over 3 months since we last communicated and to be honest, she never really crossed my mind unless yet another mutual friend brought up the fact Amy reached out. I got out of the city more. Out of the chaos. I went on some absolutely stunning backpack trips and I did the entire enchantments in one day! It was a pretty great summer and she was the last thing on my mind.

Now let’s talk about social media. I’m an IG user. I don’t have snapchat and I am very rarely on Facebook. I don’t tweet and I wont touch the platform now that Elon is at the helm. I have never unfriended someone I might see again in real life without making sure they know why. Unfriending someone on social media with no context is too passive aggressive even for this Seattle girl. I have muted people with non-stop annoying content. I have restricted people from my posts and photos. I can’t ever decide if I want a public IG to share photos of cool adventures, or if I want to keep strangers from any access to me. Sometimes I’m public but more often I’m private.

When I removed and unfollowed Amy back in August I did not block her. I disconnected our friendship on both ends through my personal and cancer-gram along with her personal and professional account. I pushed the unfriend button on Facebook. I did not block her texts or DMs. At this point, I had never, in the history of social media, blocked someone I’d known in real life. I reserved that action for creepy men. Here is the thing about blocking people on IG or FB – it deletes the entire digital friendship. All of the inside jokes, group photos, tags, comments and likes. It’s all gone, forever. Years and years worth. I love memories and I don’t erase them. To this day, I still have all my photos with Amy live on IG / FB because those were different times.

When I unfriended her, I did not unfriend anyone else close to her. Not her husband nor his business account. Not her daughter. Not close friends of hers I hardly knew. They equally did not unfollow.

By the end of summer we finally had a better understanding of how covid traveled and how we could stay safe. I masked up, grabbed my sanitizer and got back on airplanes. My daughter and I flew to Oregon for my sisters family only outdoor wedding in September. N had long since reached out to make up as we always do, our relationship forever nuanced by what it is or is not. I flew to San Francisco and then drove to Santa Cruz for his birthday in October and met up with various other mutual friends along the way. We all tagged each other in various IG stories, standing 6 feet apart and outside. It was at this point that I started getting unfollows from her family on IG. I had the “unfollows” app at the time and it was evident she was watching because the second the stories hit IG the unfollows started. Evidently she was upset. Perhaps because I was traveling? However it was more likely because she hadn’t been successful in turning everyone against me and now she had social media evidence.

Around December I got a late night notification from Instagram that I had a DM from her. It was not there when I later opened the app. I entertained the possibility of repairing our relationship at this time and nicely sent a DM that asked if she messaged me. Maybe it was an accidental unsend. She essentially laughed at me in reply. I said no more.