Digital Amalgam
By Hana Mason
The London Drugs Photo Lab emailed me to say that I had pictures that had been there for over six months and if I didn’t come to get them, they’d be put in storage for a year, after which they’d be destroyed. I’d already paid for them, so I walked downtown to pick them up. The man at the counter said they’d been there for two years already. I remembered him; he sold me the camera. He probably didn’t remember me. I said, wow, thanks for emailing me, and I left. After that, I kept walking, the photos in my bag, to no place in particular.
On the way, I ran into my friend buying a necklace for his girlfriend. I was buying nothing; I stepped into the store out of habit. On the street there was a row of stores I always browsed, procrastinating towards my actual destination of a cup of coffee. It was Valentine's Day. It was the first false spring of winter, the third false spring of the apocalypse. Things were calming down, as they say. At least we were pretending. I was looking in the glass cases. There were lots of tiny things with big price tags. I heard my name and turned around, and in the bright-hot light of the late morning, it took me a moment to register it was him. He told me he’d taken his girlfriend to that tapas place downtown for their anniversary. At first, that made me very lonely. Then I was happy because I’d shown him that restaurant, and I liked to know I had an effect on other people’s lives.
We left the store together and parted on the street. As we stepped out, he took off his mask and I saw he’d grown a beard. Every time I saw him, he looked a little different. Men could do that, change like that, in ways you maybe wouldn’t notice right away, so if it didn’t suit them, it didn’t matter, he could just change back. The beard was redder than you’d expect, given the rest of him. Maybe it was just the sun. We hugged and as I pulled away, he gave me a strange look, like he didn’t recognize me. There was a time when we both hated ourselves but liked each other, and I wondered if that was still the case. The thing about loving someone like that is it isn’t sustainable. Maybe it shows you how to love yourself, then you don’t need it as much anymore. Or maybe you show the other person how to love themselves, and they don’t need you, even if you still need them. Or maybe it just changes. I didn’t know where we were, where I was. I thought, I’d kill someone to know what he sees when he looks at me, but then I felt bad about thinking that, because so many people died every day, and the way people were talking, we’d all already killed people for nothing: for groceries, for a drink at an outdoor patio, for tapas, for coffee.
I made it to the coffee shop and opened the pictures. They were from a Fujifilm Smile and Snap disposable camera from that first summer, two years ago, when my roommate and I weren’t working but still had money, and everything felt slow and warm and strange. I was high the whole summer, you could see it in my eyes. Other than that, I didn’t recognize myself. It was like those pictures of people created by bots on Twitter, digital amalgams of how many thousands of real people to create one fake one. Those people don’t really exist. They have the light of life in their eyes, but they aren’t alive. They aren’t even dead. For a while during lockdown, I’d look at those pictures of no one, expecting to see myself eventually. Eventually, the algorithm would recreate me.
That was the summer I worried he’d die, and I wouldn’t know about it. This was partially because he was where things were worse, and I was where things were better. But really it was because he wasn’t online, and without that, I didn’t know who’d tell me these things. He could get sick, he could die, and who would tell me about it? I thought about deleting my social media too, but then I worried that other people I cared about would die and I wouldn’t know about them either. I tried not to worry that I’d die unnoticed, though.
We didn’t talk that often. What would happen was I wouldn’t text him; I wouldn’t even think about him for a few weeks, then I’d think about him a lot, then just when I was thinking that I should text him, he’d text me. Like he knew; like we were thinking about each other at the same time. I liked to feel that I was connected to someone like that. Anyway, he didn’t get sick or die, he came back, and we acted pretty much the same except instead of texting me when I thought about him a lot, he just appeared, like on Valentine’s Day at the jewelry store.
In lockdown, we wrote letters. I bought one hundred stamps for ninety-nine dollars. We only wrote back and forth a few times. I still have the roll of stamps; I’m the kind of person with a roll of stamps. I didn’t tell him I was afraid he’d die. I told him I was afraid I wouldn’t come out of this whole thing a better person. I told him I was afraid I’d never change. I wasn’t creating an identity, I told him, I was uncovering a series of irrefutable truths about myself. He wrote me: You might laugh at me for saying this, but I think when this is over, you should throw caution to the wind, and try being someone else entirely. I thought about it. I wanted to keep changing. I wanted to remain unrecognizable; I wanted to feel real.
When we stopped writing letters, I had a boyfriend. Sort of. And really there was some overlap. The letters didn’t stop because of the boyfriend, they just stopped. I was trying to be someone else entirely. It was summer, so sometimes we went to patios, but mostly we drank at home. One night in my apartment, his hand still resting like a shell on the damp mollusk of my crotch, he said, I feel like you use me to train for dating like runners use treadmills to train for marathons. I was very confused because I thought I was just running the marathon.
After my coffee, I went down to the harbour. It was colder down there, in the wind. Far-off there were clouds, winter’s next wave. There was a dog on one of the boats, tied to the railing. There was a cat on another boat, free. I worried the dog would see the cat and leap from the boat and strangle itself. That’s what I thought about going after what you wanted. I couldn’t look at them anymore. I thought about my treadmill boyfriend, and what I possibly could have done differently. When I told him he wasn’t practice, he said, well maybe you need some. He didn’t say it outright, but I knew the real problem was the texting. I was better long-form, analog. He’d send me some joke or ask me something about myself and I’d just start making plans instead of really answering. And I never asked him anything about himself via text. Once he tried to sext me. I saw the string of single-sentence texts coming in—I’m kissing your neck. I’m pulling down your panties. You’re so wet—but pretended I didn’t. I didn’t respond for hours. I saw the follow-ups pop up—what do you do to me? Hey, where are you? I ignored them. I texted, sorry omg, I was totally zoned out all day! I think this was the last straw for him. It didn’t upset me that much, being pseudo-dumped by my treadmill boyfriend. So maybe he was right about me.
The sun came out for a moment and warmed my face. I closed my eyes and loved the pink-heat on my eyelids. I didn’t feel like the girl who wrote those letters, the girl in those pictures. I had failed to be entirely different. All my changes happened to me without my knowing. I thought about how you can feel different and changed without anything really happening to you, without any concrete evidence or example. I took the photos out again. I thought about throwing them in the harbour and leaving, but I had paid for them, after all, and I didn’t hate the girl in them, I just didn’t know her. Maybe I really had gone and become someone else. I remembered her distantly, through a haze. I thought I maybe even loved her.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Hana Mason is a Victoria-based writer from Calgary. She is an MFA student at the University of Victoria. You can find her fiction and poetry in Little Fiction, Riddle Fence, Minola Review, Carousel, untethered magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @hanamasonwrites.