Illustration by Michael Gillette

On August 17, 2010, I got an e-mail from Facebook notifying me that I had received a message. It was from my ex-boyfriend’s mother. Its subject heading was “Goodbye from Nancy and Bill.” Nancy and Bill are my ex-boyfriend’s parents, though I’ve changed their names (and those of everyone else here). I opened the message with great curiosity and a little terror. Why was Nancy saying goodbye? Was she finally moving to Switzerland to live near her brother and his Japanese wife? Did she have a terminal illness? The message said:

Hi, Lena—Bill and I remember you with such pleasure and fondness! But it’s time to sever the Facebook connection so I’m going to block you. We wish you all the BEST!

I was dumbfounded. I can only compare it to the feeling of opening your cupboard to grab a cookie, but instead of getting a cookie you get dick-slapped. I wanted to write back “Why?” I wanted to write back “What the fuck?” I wanted to write back “Like I’d even notice if you just unfriended me, or even if you died, you crazy fucking hag.” But I couldn’t. I couldn’t write anything. Because she had blocked me.

Close to tears, I called my mother. My mom is a Long Island Jew, and my dad is a Connecticut Wasp, and they were in Deer Isle, Maine, visiting his best friend from boarding school. Everyone but my mom was out sailing on a boat known as Cognac; she was inside the cottage, having an asthma attack. That is, she was happily avoiding day-old tuna salad and being asked to “grab the rudder for a second” and reading Vanity Fair by the land line instead. I told her the story, and she was scandalized. “How inappropriate!” she cried. “How wrong! That woman is a grownup, and you are a child. Why would she do this?” She told me to write a levelheaded query about it to my ex-boyfriend, Noah. I did as I was told. A model of equanimity, I forwarded the message to him with the heading “What the fuck is this shit?”

He wrote back quickly: “Oh my god. Well, I was just hanging out with them and we kept on getting into these conversations (with my grandparents, too) about the Internet and virtual spaces and avatars. . . . Something must have reorganized in her thinking about her online presence. She means it when she says she remembers you with pleasure and fondness. By the way, I have moved to the Bay Area. I hope you are well.”

He had moved? Without even telling me? After a year and a half of my telling people that I wished he would move and not even tell me? I was insulted. And I wouldn’t drop it. I e-mailed him again: “What did I do? What set it off? Was it the trailer for my movie? Was it my Twitter?” He conceded that Nancy did feel she learned too much about me from my status updates. Like the one where I said something like “It’s Christmas day and I have a raging UTI—do you think I got it from watching 9½ weeks?” Or was it the one that sort of goes “I want to date a male flight attendant. Everyone I’ve slept with is gay anyway.” Here’s the thing, or at least a thing, about me—I hate offending people. Even though I love the feel of something vaguely offensive on my tongue, I guess I want to have my cake and tweet it, too.

I promptly unlinked my Twitter and Facebook accounts. I was both angry and mortified. The thought of Nancy consciously deciding that she didn’t want to hear what I had to say was torturing me. It’s not as if we were soul twins. She was a former est person. She was always doing cleanses, yet she still had an inner tube of flesh around her middle—something that I wouldn’t begrudge if her son hadn’t once told me that he thought Nancy and I had “the same genre of body.” She put hot clarified butter in her eyeballs with a dropper, which is supposedly an Ayurvedic tradition. When Noah was young, she would walk him to school, walk straight home, and lie in a patch of sun on the carpet until it was time to pick him up. She recounted this more as an act of devotion and less as a symptom of an almost Victorian melancholy. She noticed that I always picked all the carrots out of my stir fry.

The main result of Nancy’s Facebook rejection was to send me down memory lane in a pretty disconcerting way. My relationship with Noah had, I realized, ended two years before, to the day—on August 17, 2008—after a year and a half of dating that felt like fifty. The emotional acrobatics involved turned my heart into a hardened little gymnast with tiny tits and a leotard wedgie. Although I usually refer to him as “that interpretive dancer I dated,” Noah was, in fact, my best friend and arguably the only man I’ve ever truly loved.

I met him junior year at Oberlin. He had recently returned from six months in India and wore hemp cargo pants that in theory were offensive; in practice, they highlighted his lean, impressive body as he strode across the quad, deep in thought. Our first meeting took place in the cafeteria. My friend Molly and I were pounding veggie burgers and planning an ironic weekend trip to the Cleveland Salvation Army when Noah and his friend Brian walked in. It was snowing, and they were both wearing giant high-tech mittens that made them look like Transformers. They sat down at our table. They were holding hands.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“It’s an experiment,” Noah told me. “Girls hold hands with their friends all the time. Why can’t Brian and I do it, too?”

I said something unenlightened like “Because it looks super gay. Are you gay?”

He eyed me with vague sadness (and did I detect some wanton longing?). “I used to wonder about that,” he said. “But then I realized that being gay is much too easy a solution for the problem that I have.”

Suddenly, he was everywhere: in the library, leaving a screening of “J’Accuse,” parking his bicycle and running into the general store to buy two apples. He told me that he ate only meat and fruit, and that he slept without a pillow or a blanket. He was writing his cinema-studies thesis about “Hook,” using it as “a metaphor for self-actualization and childhood regression.” He gave me the thesis to read. I read seven pages, enough to determine that he was probably very smart, then I put it down in favor of the autobiography of Rupert Everett.