In the time of Facebook, it's no wonder people can't get over their exes. It's so easy, so tempting, to constantly stalk them and see what they're up to. We are obsessed with seeing how they're doing, if they're happy, if so just how happy.
I was no exception to this.
When Isaac and I first broke up, I wanted nothing to do with looking at his Facebook or even announcing we weren't engaged anymore. Everyone already knew. With so much going on, social media was the least of my worries. I started the whole process out by being horribly pissed off.
And then came the mourning.
It seemed I was doing alright with life. I had my mourning period where I purged everything of Isaac from social media—from changing my relationship status to single to deleting all our pictures off Facebook and Instagram.
Then I got pissed again and completely forgot about it.
Surprisingly, it wasn't until months later I started the social media obsessive phase. I was just doing a little too well in life, and so I had to prove it. I took a lot of photos with my family and making posts about how good life was and how important and precious family was. I also looked damn fine in those pictures and that wasn't by accident. I told myself I was letting everyone else know how good I was, but really I wanted them to see. In hindsight, I realize that was a pitiful and futile move because they clearly couldn't give a shit about me.
Anyway, when I finally got up the nerve to stalk both Isaac and Joanna, I found myself blocked. I shook it off at first and pretended it didn't matter—that it was better this way.
But the more I thought about how I couldn't see how and what they were doing, the more I got bothered. Obsessing over them took a huge toll on me. It got to the point where I logged into Sally's Facebook account just to check out their profiles (for some reason they didn't block her and were still Facebook friends with her; and she got on so rarely she didn't even think to unfriend them herself). For the longest time, they didn't post anything. This both angered and appeased me. Okay, so they were, I guess, being respectful and not throwing their love in my face.
Then the relationship status came. Joanna did it first, followed shortly by Isaac. After that came the obligatory name change; the name I should have had. The profile picture changed, too. They looked perfect together to the untrained eye. Her beautiful blonde hair was pulled up with a few curly strands framing her perfect heart face. She was smiling with her face turned, eyes closed, as he kissed her cheek. It was a gorgeous photo for those were blissfully unaware of their deceitful relationship—of the marriage that was supposed to be mine. It looked like it was a small wedding. Her dress was plain and short; he was wearing a simple suit.
When I scrolled viciously through the comments, I was disgusted to learn people were congratulating them and happy for them. One even asked when the wedding was (apparently they weren't invited). Joanna answered all too eagerly.
October 22nd.
They even stole my damn wedding month.
I pretty much spiraled after that. My family was very confused for the longest time why, after months of doing fairly well, I fell back into mourning. Someone must have told them about the wedding because it didn't take them long to come out and ask me. In that time, though, I scrolled, painfully, through every single wedding picture they had; every post they tagged each other in; every post Joanna made in reference to their perfect life together.
It was almost routine. I would wake up, log in, and depress myself. Halfway through the day, I'd log in again, and just for good measure I did it before bed so I was good and shitty just in time for another sleepless night. It was almost like I was punishing myself. I had no self-control.
When my aunt and uncle confronted me and asked if that was why I was miserable again, I confessed to Sally I'd been using her account. To save me from myself, I asked her to change the password. She did, and also blocked them for good measure. I never told anyone besides Sally what I'd been doing, but I later found out my whole family blocked them after that. It took a while, but I got through it. My Facebook trigger was bad for a couple of days. I was an addict, in a way. It was habit to just check up on them and to not be able to see everything they were doing on social media was harder than I realized it would be.
So for once, when I posted a selfie of me and Alice hanging out, it wasn't to show people how well I was doing. It was just a nice picture of us I wanted to post. I didn't look particularly pretty that day—I had mascara on, my hair pinned back, and was in my black Shoney's uniform. But I posted it anyway because Alice and I were friends.
And she was ridiculously excited to take a selfie with me.
Evan and Alice were having lunch alone but I wasn't serving them. The second Alice spotted me, though, her blue eyes grew as big as the saucers I was carrying and she practically screamed at me to come over. Since I was the only waitress who actually put any effort into my job, I was allowed to get away with more shit since Carl would never fire me. So after I placed the food at my table, I sauntered over to Alice.
"Look at you, in your official getup!" Alice cried.
I gave her a skeptical look. "Alice, it's Tuesday. What're you doing here?"
She grinned wide enough for her dimple to show. "I skipped."
I raised a brow and crossed my arms over my chest.
"Oh, don't give me that disapproving mother look!" she chastised, pointing a finger at me. "I can skip. I have four skips!"
"It's the beginning of the semester," I said. "Don't you wanna save those? For, like, emergencies?"
"These are unexplained absences," she reasoned. "So it's fine! Plus it's better to skip in the beginning than towards the end."
"Mhm," I muttered, shaking my head with a small laugh. "Well, I'd better get back to—"
"Selfie!" Alice cried, pulling out her phone like a trophy. "This just calls for a selfie!"
I considered myself. My hair was hastily blow dried and clipped back severely with a dozen bobbypins. I had only mascara on, which meant my skin was red and blotchy. But there was a desperate look in Alice's eyes that dared me to defy her.
"Uh, sure," I agreed, delicately edging in for the picture.
Evan, bless him, looked like he was in pure hell. He had deep bags under his normally bright blue eyes. He didn't look particularly happy, and certainly not as bright and bubbly as Alice was. But then, she seemed a little too bright and bubbly today. There was something off about it. I wondered, briefly, if something had happened between the two?
"Closer!" Alice cried, craning her phone as far back as her short hand would go.
We watched as our faces completely transformed before us. Evan, to his credit, managed a smile. I smiled with visible awkwardness, while Alice did her cutest pout and angled her face to where she thought it was best flattering. And as soon as the picture was taken, our faces fell back to their normal routine.
Evan immediately went back to his phone without so much as a word to me. I wasn't used to seeing them by themselves without Landon. It was weird to me. There was definitely something missing when he was away. But I didn't think Landon's absence was the reason behind Evan's moodiness. I'd have to ask Alice if everything was okay.
"Well, I should really get back to work," I said, jabbing my thumb in the direction of the kitchen.
"Stop by whenever!" Alice practically screamed after me.
It wasn't until I was handing orders that I realized Jimmy was working and a thought occurred to me. "Hey, Jimmy!" I called. "Is your brother okay?"
The cook squinted his hazel eyes at me. "What d'you mean?"
"I dunno, he just seems a little off."
Jimmy shrugged, clearly unconcerned. "Who knows? He gets a little grumpy when school is back in, though. He'd rather be on calls with Dad than sitting at a desk. Dad makes him go to school and he hates it. I mean, it's taken him a long time to get through just a few courses at Cstate cause he does such a small class load at a time and he took a year off." He blinked as if he, too, didn't know why he'd given me so much information. The thing about Jimmy, though, was that once his mouth got going it was hard to stop it. It had worked to our advantage several times.
"Oh," I said, a little bit overloaded with information I hadn't asked for. "That...sucks."
He shrugged again. "He's smart, though. He just doesn't put it to good use. He's never liked school."
I wanted to run. These were not things I should be hearing from anyone but Evan. I hated when people did this to me and I certainly didn't want to stand there while Jimmy fed me personal information. "Uh, table five done yet?" I asked, knowing I'd literally just handed him the order.
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Later, when my shift ended, I did end up calling Alice to ask if everything was okay. She denied it at first because, well, she's Alice and wants everything to be perfect.
"Are you sure? Cause y'all seemed kinda off at lunch today..."
And that was pretty much all the pressing I had to do before she was blubbering crying.
I felt like an asshole.
"Oh my God, please don't cry! I'm sorry, Jesus Christ, I'm sorry. Shit, are you okay? Do I need to come down there right now? Alice, I am in my car right now, I can be there in like ten minutes. Please, say you're okay!"
She laughed tearfully. "God, Mar, calm down. Everyone knows I'm a cry baby." She sniffed. "It's just really hard when Landon's gone, ya know? Like sometimes I swear we don't know how to be friends without him. And it doesn't help that there is this obvious tension when he's not around. Like...I don't know. I feel like lately I'm worse at hiding it and I think Evan is onto me."
"Well then maybe now is a good time to tell him."
She snorted. "Yeah right. I'm never telling him."
We'd had this conversation before, of course. But that was a long time ago. At least it felt like it. "Hon, you can't keep it bottled up in you forever. Eventually, you're gonna explode. And you owe it to yourself to at least try. I hate that you're torturing yourself. You deserve to be happy. Hell, you deserve to at least know how he really feels about you."
"Marley, I love you...but aren't you kinda one to talk?"
I was stunned, to say the least. Trying not to get offended, I asked, "What do you mean?"
She sighed. "Nothing. I'm sorry, I'm crabby. I don't mean to pressure you. I know you've got your own way of dealing with stuff."
"And you've got yours," I conceded. "Whatever you decide to do, you know I support you. I just...worry about you."
"Marley, I'm glad I have a girl friend." She paused. "I'm really happy we're friends."
I smiled wide. "I really am, too." And suddenly a thought occurred to me. "Did you tag me in that photo you took at lunch?"
"I didn't even post it! I figured it'd make you uncomfortable."
I swear to God I almost started blubbering as bad as she had been a moment ago. How could someone who knew me for only a few months already get me than the girl who'd been my lifelong friend? "Well, tag me when you post it."
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A/N Listen, I loved the beginning of this chapter and just the general layout of it surrounding Facebook. I'm super guilty of this. I randomly have issues letting go of past friendships and I swear I'm a masochist cause I just scroll through their lives wishing I'd been there in that moment with them, and by all means should've been if things hadn't happened. So I get Marley so much with closure. It sucks. And I hope y'all can identify with that as well. It's so important to know that you're not alone. And the fact that she's moving on with Alice and making her own memories without any regards to buffing up her life on social media. I was so proud of Marley's growth in this chapter.
I'm so excited to get on with the Big Plans. It's gonna start to unfold within the next chapter (I hope you're seeing what I've been leading up to). I just reread my outline from months ago and I got ridiculously excited so I'm probs gonna keep writing until the wee hours of the morning even though I have to get up early for my nephew's baseball game (cheer him on! He's five and he's amazing!)
As always, I hope you're enjoying the read!
TTFN,
Hannah
P.S I'm back, bitches
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