Delete Your Account

I recently imagined a conversation between famed declutter-er Marie Kondo and the notoriously disorganized poet Elizabeth Bishop. “Do they spark joy?” Kondo would ask, while Bishop, as instructed, considered scraps of paper, used cocktail napkins, and notebook pages on which she’d written bits of text in her shaky alcoholic’s hand. “I don’t know yet,” she says.

Kondo and Bishop are diametrically opposed on the question of ephemera. Kondo’s minimalism is all about detangling meaning from material; Bishop is the poet laureate of stuff. Her best work came from the scrap heap, literally. She was always scribbling, she said, “in someone else’s house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night.” She was a panicked person, a survivor of childhood traumas and many lost loved ones; she wrote things down with the frenzy of someone grabbing everything they can as they flee a burning house.

I am of the anxious Bishop school of stuff, which is why I haven’t been able to delete my Facebook account. I don’t hoard clothes or appliances, or buy too much online. But I keep ticket stubs, restaurant pens, matchbooks, Post-its—little memory crumbs. I’m guided by the hysterical suspicion that “someday, I’ll want this,” even though it is largely crap.

Now more and more my crap is digital, and Facebook is its biggest repository. I don’t remember exactly when I noticed that even the marginalia of my life is collected behind a screen, but what used to happen on paper—the careless, casual, and pragmatic—has been sucked up into platforms and devices, along with the big stuff: love letters, breakups, job offers, photos, diary entries. Over Christmas I was home in California, in my parents’ living room, looking at their dozens of photo albums, which sit on top of files worth of paperwork, across from their record collection. I thought about how all of these items exist for me in a fraction of the space. In a computer, yes, but really in a cloud—and suddenly that phrase seemed completely insane. In a cloud? My stuff is in a cloud, like an angel, or a rainbow. And on Facebook.

Nearly two decades on from Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facemash at Harvard (“They ‘trust me’ . . . dumb fucks,” he allegedly wrote in a rather disturbingly on-brand instant message around the time), we now know what it means to have chronicled so much of our lives in a medium owned by a private company intent on world domination. How Facebook shamelessly sold out its users’ data, ignored their privacy, and profited. But my Facebook is like an entire 10-plus-years-long yearbook of adolescence, during which I used it every single day. I joined Facebook on Saturday, September 24, 2005, at 3:13 p.m. I was 15 years old; I had recently gotten my braces taken off. Since then, I’ve had two passports, three dogs, two degrees, three jobs, four boyfriends, one wisdom tooth extraction surgery, two presidents (the wars remain the same), all of which is diarized there, in posts, comments, photos and messages. As a Facebook user, the company designates your “Friend Peer Group,” and the “life stage description of your friends on Facebook”: Mine is labelled “Starting Adult Life.” How can I let it go?

You can’t imagine what’s inside your Facebook account when you’ve had it for this long. The first step is to download it; it arrives in an indexed zip file. You can see your very first “Wall” post, back when there were walls and not Timelines. My friend Will wrote the first item on my wall on September 27: “i took your wall’s virginity, as all the cool kids say. good job on the big win over bullis today.” (He is sufficiently embarrassed by this now, though he points out that he did congratulate me on a tennis game.) My own first post is a comment in a group formed against the latest film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, called “If It’s Not BBC, It’s Not Pride and Prejudice”: “i knew it would be bad when HOWIE DAY was featured in the commercial!!!” I wrote. “this is not even the BEGINNING of my complaints.”

From there, it’s thousands of bits of texts—they’re not posts anymore, really, when you get them in the data packet, since they appear largely without the photos or links they refer to, if they’re comments, and because they are not in the wall-to-wall format that would allow them to be read as a conversation. You have to guess, a bit, to understand what the old you is talking about. It’s bizarre to read my own very earnest nascent Internet voice, considering how much my current one is characterized by irony (though the posts that approach the 2016 presidential election feel, unfortunately, more familiar). And to see Facebook in its earliest, sweeter days: Did we really once use this strange white space with the blue guy in the upper left hand corner just to say hello, to find each other? It seems ludicrous now to think that anyone who was looking for me couldn’t find me, given Instagram, Find My Friends, Twitter, and the like, but so many people wrote, “Where are you?”

The amount of sheer stuff in my data is staggering; I found myself landing on smaller, random moments than seeking out specifics. Someone wrote on my wall congratulating me on getting my own cell phone on November 5, 2005 (I used to share one with my sister). The plethora of status updates that now erroneously start with “is” because of the old format is funny and sort of quaint, now, a little grammatical timestamp. The “removed friends” section is essentially a catalogue of men who scorned me, some of whom I had to struggle to recall. Some features don’t go so far back—my events start in 2009, in college, their titles ranging from things like “North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference” to something called “Twinkin and Drinkin.” The countless videos and photos are time capsules of my worst haircuts.

I laughed while reading—and cringed too. But mostly it felt foreign, like someone else had written all the things I’d written, as well as what my friends had, a gaggle of avatars. The pared-down HTML pages the data is displayed in reflects this distance, its broken links and photo-less posts like vampirized versions of what they were, now drained of color.

As Facebook grew in its scope and ambition, its intimate reach into our personal lives grew with it. And so, at some point, it introduced “Remembering,” a function that turned a dead person’s page into a memorial, because the company could not simply take it down, and because, well, everyone dies, and by that point, nearly everyone had a Facebook. I remember the day in 2012 when the “Remembering” function appeared above my boyfriend Paul’s page, after he died of cancer after we graduated from college, so small above his name you could almost miss it.

I knew I would find messages between us in the data, in addition to our photos, wall posts, likes, and pokes. I knew, particularly, that one of the last conversations we had ever had occurred on the Facebook messenger app, while I was sitting on a plane at JFK and he was sitting in his room in New York, apologizing for arguing with me before I left for the airport. “Thanks for being so strong even though it was shitty,” he writes on August 27 at 6:23 p.m. Then we talked about the episode of television we were both watching.

This is the contradictory fact of having the totality of our relationships now digitized: The ephemera, the scraps, are enshrined with the big stuff, the arguments, declarations, and discoveries, our conversations flattened into one years-long instant message chat. Everything is saved—and there is a seductive certainty to this, a comfort, especially when you are scrambling for something to jog a memory, for a piece of a lost person. And Facebook gives you so much of them, bites and bites of their words. The format is even searchable.

Yet these records can’t comprise them, not even close. The hundreds of messages between Paul and me are mostly “hey,” “what’s up,” “love you,” because we were talking in real life. I know, I remember. The finality of death throws attention and intention into sharp relief, attention being the currency of Facebook and its social media descendants; yes, we spent all that time and energy on this platform, years and years of it, and yes, some of it was with people we love. That can all be archived in a zip file. But the things we mean to say, like, I love you, we find a way to say them, and show them, over and over again, regardless of platform, writing them wherever we can, on any scrap of paper we can find.

Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day until Valentine’s Day.