Tonight’s kind of a catalyst for this post. I just received another message, and it’s worse than any of the others.
My girlfriend died on the 7th of August, 2012. She was involved in a
three car collision driving home from work when someone ran a red light.
She passed away within minutes on the scene.
We had been dating for five years at that point. She wasn’t big on
the idea of marriage (it felt archaic, she said, gave her a weird vibe),
but if she had been, I would have married her within three months of
our relationship. She was vibrant; the kind of girl that would choose
dare every time. She was happiest when camping, but a total technophile
too. She always smelled like cinnamon.
That being said, she wasn’t perfect. She always said something along
the lines of, “If I kark it first, don’t just say good things about me.
I’ve never liked that. If you don’t pay me out, you’re doing me a
disservice. I’ve got so many flaws, and that’s just part of me.” So,
this is for Em: the music she said she liked and the music she actually
liked were very different. Her idea of affection was a side-hug. She had
really long toes, like a chimpanzee.
I know that’s tangential, but I don’t feel right discussing her without you having an idea of what she was like.
Onto the meat. Em had been dead for approaching thirteen months when she first messaged me.
September 4, 2013.
This is when it began. I had left Emily’s Facebook account activated so
I could send her the occasional message, post on her wall, go through
her albums. It felt too final (and too un-Emily) to memorialise it. I
‘share’ access with her mother (Susan) - meaning, her mother has her
login and password and has spent a total of approximately three minutes
on the website (or on a computer, total). After a little confusion, I
assumed it was her.
November 16th, 2013.
I had received confirmation from Susan that she hadn’t logged in to
Em’s Facebook since the week of her death. Em knew a lot of people, so I
instantly assumed this was one of her more tech savvy ‘friends’ fucking
with me in the worst possible way.
I noticed pretty much immediately that whoever was chatting with me was recycling old messages from
Em and my’s shared chat history.
The ‘the wheels on the bus' comment was from when we were discussing
songs to play on a road trip that never eventuated. ‘hello’ happened a
million times.
Around
February 2014, Emily started tagging herself
in my photos. I would get notifications for them, but the tag would
generally always be removed by the time I got to it. The first time I
actually caught one, it felt like someone had punched me in the gut.
‘She’ would tag herself in spaces where it was plausible for her to be,
or where she would usually hang out. I’ve got screenshots of two (from
April and June; these are the only ones I’ve caught, so they’re a little
out of the timeline I’m trying to write out):
http://i.imgur.com/X9G5agJ.png
http://i.imgur.com/55FwXKt.png
Around this period of time, I stopped being able to sleep. I was too angry to sleep.
She would tag herself in random photos every couple of weeks. The
friends who noticed and said something thought it was a fucked up bug; I
found out recently that there have been friends who have noticed and
didn’t say anything. Some of them have removed me from their Facebook
friends list.
At this point, some of you may be wondering why I didn’t just kill my
Facebook profile. I wish I had. I did for a little while. On days when I
can’t get out there, though, it’s nice having my friends available to
chat. It’s nice visiting Em’s page when the little green circle isn’t
next to her name. I was already socially reclusive when Em was alive;
her death turned me into something pretty close to a hermit, and
Facebook and MMOs were (are) my only real social outlets.
On March 15th, I sent what I assumed was Em's hacker a message.
On March 25th, I received an ‘answer’.
It wasn’t until I was going over these logs a few months later that I noticed she was recycling my own words as well.
My response seems kind of lacklustre here. I was intentionally
providing him/her with emotional ‘bait’ (‘This is actually devastating’)
to keep them interested in their game; I was working off the assumption
that the kind of person to do this would be the kind of person that
would thrive on the distress of others. I was posting in tech forums,
looking for ways to track this person, contacting Facebook. I needed to
keep them around so I could gather ‘evidence’.
Before anyone asks, yes, I had changed the password and all security info countless times.
16th of April. I receive this.
This seems like word salad. Like all our conversations so far, it’s recycled from previous messages she’s sent.
29th of April.
I hadn’t discovered any leads. Facebook had told me the locations her
page had been accessed from, but since her death, they’re all places I
can account for (my home, my work, her mum’s house, etc). My response
here wasn’t bait. ‘yo ask Nathan’ was an in-joke too lame worth
explaining, but seeing ‘her’ say it again just absolutely fucking
crippled me. My reaction in real life was much less prettier. I’m not
expecting my bond back.
Her last few messages had started to scare me, but I wouldn’t admit it at this point.
8th of May. I don’t really have the words for this.
‘FRE EZIN G’ is the first original word she’s (?) made. This has
given me nightmares that have only started to kick in recently. I keep
dreaming that she’s in an ice cold car, frozen blue and grey, and I’m
standing outside in the warmth screaming at her to open the door. She
doesn’t even realise I’m there. Sometimes her legs are outside with me.
24th of May.
I wasn’t actually drunk. She wasn’t an affectionate girl, and it
always embarrassed her to exchange ‘I love you’s, cuddle, talk about how
much we meant to each other. She was more comfortable with it when I
was boozed up. I got fake-drunk a lot.
Her reply is what prompted me to finally memorialise her page,
thinking it might help curb this behaviour. It might seem innocuous
compared to her previous message - it’s pasted from an old conversation
where I was trying to convince her to let me drive her home from a
friend’s.
In the collision, the dashboard had crushed her. She was severed in a
diagonal line from her right hip to midway down her left thigh. One of
her legs was found tucked under the backseat.
Going back in time. 7th of August, 2012.
These are logs from the day she died. She was usually home from work
by 4.30. This, alongside a couple of voicemail messages, is the last
time I talked to her under the assumption that she was alive. You’ll see
why I’m showing you these soon.
Yesterday. 1st of July, 2014.
I memorialised her page a couple of days after I received the message
about walking. Until today, she’d been quiet; she wasn’t even tagging
herself in my photos.
I don’t know what to do anymore. Do I kill her memorial page? What if it is her? I want to puke. I don’t know what’s happening.
I just heard a Facebook alert. I'm too afraid to swap windows and check it.
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