It happens like this: he is here, you and he are having a great time drinking rosé outside on one of the islands that is a Sunny Spring Day in Portland. You met in real life, not on the apps. You say this to friends proudly after the great first date as if it edifies the romance, as if it lends a degree of integrity to the whole affair. Meeting on the apps is for troglodytes, it’s for people who do not have social skills, it is for people who sit at home every night and eat pizza and watch Netflix. Meeting on the apps is for people who turn their heat slightly down so their cat will be forced to show them more affection and sit on their lap; these App People look out their blinds like the man who was Amelie’s neighbor who never left his apartment for fear of breaking his bones, they get on their phone and woof at men on the apps and fantasize about meeting men who will never want to meet them in real life, they don’t even fantasize about hot steamy sex at this point they would settle for holding hands while watching a movie, this is what people on the apps do they fantasize about buying groceries together, they fantasize about lying in bed and watching Vine clips together and laughing (yes I know RIP Vine but remember this is a fantasy and also a memory of when I was happiest), they fantasize about deleting these same apps that brought them together.

Anyway. You met this guy in real life.It’s only after this great fourth? Fifth? date that you realize it’s been very chaste. Sure, you’ve made out and kissed, but is this someone who will ever look at you across a candlelit table and think “This is someone I am going to douche for who I am going to wake up to in the morning“?

You find out the next day, when you text him and tell him how much you enjoyed the night. He reads the message, because this brave soul has his read notifications turned on for you. But then…he never answers. You text him again the morning after this. No reply, and no read notification. And just like that, he has apparated away to someone else’s glass of rosé. You are an App Person again.

Your anxiety is not a monster lurking under your bed. Your anxiety is not is wrecking ball about to obliterate you. No no, your anxiety is your superpower. It used to be monstrous, but you defeated it, shrunk it, molded it into the shape of your choice. It is a thin cotton cord, a string really. Have you ever seen a chalk-line used in construction and also in theatrical set production? It is that, but bright yellow. When you need it, when you need to write against a deadline, or create an image for your art, or rally your team to create an episode of your webseries, you go to the string, you pluck it, usually a soft tap will do, but sometimes you pull it back and it gives  twang as it snaps when you release it, the yellow chalk puffs off of it and you inhale as much as you need. When you have to speak in front of a crowd or when you are reminded of a heartbreak or when you are embarrassed, you take the anxiety and give it back to the thin yellow line. That is what you do now, when Jeremy, the man who provoked optimism and rosé, ghosts you. You take this anxiety and you acknowledge it, but you do not have time for it now. You hold it, it is small and weak, you take it to the thin yellow line, you place it there gently and deliberately, and not lovingly. You pack it onto the line with your hands, you make sure it sticks, you whisper to it that you will be back when you need it, and not the other way around.

We call it “ghosting” because there is not more accurate word for someone who was here, and now they are not. You are friends with a couple people from high school, and quite a few people from college. You have friends in the cities you lived, except strangely, few friends in Chicago where you lived for three years. You think of the people you knew there, wish you had been closer to them and not focused on your relationship which ultimately failed. Maybe we get better at being friends over the ages, maybe we get more skilled at finding people who stick around.

Then again.

You think about the times you’ve been abandoned in your life. Most recently, a best friend and you, Horse, parted ways after a hangout/photo shoot with friends went horribly awkwardly wrong when you pressed an uncomfortable situation. The two of you never spoke about it, you just went your separate ways and had a couple inelegant text exchanges. You had been friends for three years after you dated for a bit, and the parting, though inauspicious, was relatively drama-free. You were in each others’ lives until you were not, and now you won’t be in each others’ lives again. It wasn’t easy for you by any means, but you speculate that it was necessary for both. You both got less out of the friendship than you put in, and you knew that being apart was going to be healthier than staying friends in the long run.

You think about the time in 2015 you had a rough breakup. You’ve had time to write about it, process it, and try to move on. You tried everything you could to speed up the healing process: being with other guys, seeing a therapist, filling your days with creative projects. That thin yellow line got a lot of anxiety packed on it in the years after the breakup. Eventually the anger cooked off and all that’s left at your core is deep love for him. People move in and out of our lives like seasons, like planets. You are embarrassed to admit it, but even years later you sometimes hope his orbit comes around again. Love has strange gravity; love is the biggest, hungriest singularity there is.

When you were young, you lost your brother. Longtime readers of the blog are familiar with this story, and how you’ve always speculated that losing him suddenly was formative for your abandonment issues (Fair Warning: THESE ARE NOT MY FUNNIEST POSTS). You don’t know that that’s true, but you don’t know that it isn’t. In truth, it’s probably a combination of early influences: you were a gentle, funny, nerdy little kid. In adolescence your family moved about half an hour outside of town and you didn’t get the chance to hang out with friends very much after school that you attended in the city. You pined for certain boys but you were deeply closeted and never articulated the feelings. In your early romances, the butterfly feelings for someone were always accompanied by the hollow, metallic feeling of dread of being discovered. You eventually had a series of long relationships with really great men, but this ill-prepared you for the realities of being single later in life. In a way, being abandoned has made you cherish people in your life who stay near you, even more.

Being abandoned feels like being that kid in the mall who’s lost their parents: you feel rudderless, you feel confused, you feel scared. No one wants being abandoned to feel easy either, no one wants to be good at being left behind. Maybe the trick is to just know that at its core, we have ourselves and what’s inside our own skin, and we don’t own anyone’s presence. Everyone has been left by someone they care about, or left someone who cared about them.

We may not be good at a lot of things, but we’re all experts at saying goodbye.