I know the power of a barrier between self and another…of loving someone from a distance. 
– Emily Rapp Black, Sanctuary 

We learn to pretend all the time. 
– Frederik Backman, Anxious People 
 

In 2008, after depleting most of the LA-based JDate pool, I signed up for OK Cupid! with plans of just window-shopping, which would come with less risk than actual dating. At 24, I’d already had too much sex with too many partners—much of it unprotected—and I wanted to do better, be better. I even printed out a note-to-self on pretty pink paper. This year, I vow to be more careful with my resources—my time, my money, and my body. The sentence sat framed in the kitchen of my tiny Hollywood Hills rental, a permanent reminder that I scanned whenever I cobbled together a meal or made a cup of coffee.  

Days after creating my profile (I’m a student teacher who loves macaroni and cheese, singing in the shower, and nights spent with my girlfriends…), I had a message in my inbox from 33-year-old Matt. He lived locally in Santa Monica, worked as a TV writer, and wanted to take me out for a drink. Best of all, he didn’t understand how someone as beautiful as myself could be single, and boy was I a sucker for that line. I was so jumbled up with those giddy, new-potential-romance feelings that I started to think: Okay, Cupid: What would the harm be in meeting just this one guy? He could be The One!   

Matt only had a single head shot posted online, so I immediately googled my potential future-husband, hoping to find more photo evidence of him. He must have had all of his social accounts set to private though because I couldn’t find a thing on him. Once I learned more information about him, including his last name and the college he attended, I searched again. Still nothing. I put some of my more Internet-savvy friends on the job. Their searches came up empty too. It struck me as a bit odd that someone who worked in TV wouldn’t pop up on IMDB, the Internet Movie Database. Maybe I need IMDB Pro to find him, I thought, but I wasn’t about to spend $150 to find out. My friends said Matt was putting me on. That these days, it’s impossible for a person not to have LinkedIn or Facebook or a Twitter presence or even a former Myspace page floating around in the ether. (This was a pre-Instagram world.) “He’s a private guy!” I countered in his defense. 

Their negativity floated away whenever I spoke to Matt. Talking to him, or rather typing, was effortless. We had a writing background in common, and I loved that he was both sweet and a little wounded. He’d broken up with his longtime, live-in girlfriend half a year ago; she wanted to move back to Texas—where they were from—and he needed to stay in LA for his career. She left him devastated. 

A few weeks into our online courtship, which at this point, included only messaging one another, I was at work for my school’s open house when Matt texted me in a panic. His 15-year-old nephew had just committed suicide, slitting his wrists straight down the grain “like a good Davidson.” Like all the other men in his family: “down the road, not across the street.” (Matt later shared that his dad, grandfather, and uncle had all done the same.) 

I was stunned, but not turned off. I told him that my maternal grandmother had committed suicide too and that my paternal grandfather had been hospitalized for mental illness. I myself was taking Wellbutrin for depression at the time, and suicide was an idea I’d often flirted with. I kept that last bit to myself though.  

Matt seemed relieved to have me to confide in, but he had a flight to catch, and I had anxious parents awaiting me in the classroom. “Get on that plane,” I typed discreetly into my purse, “and call when you want to talk. I’ll be here.”  

For weeks, Matt stayed in Texas. He sent me messages whenever he could, but he was understandably busy holding his family together. His sister was on the verge of a psychotic break. Matt was worried he might even have to hospitalize her. Then, there was Matt’s 12-year-old niece, who needed consistency and routine—some semblance of normalcy. I felt sick to my stomach thinking about the terrible position that they were in.  

Through it all, we communicated daily via text, email, or Google chat. I even sent him a photo of me buck naked once, wearing only cowboy boots. (The man was grieving.) “For my Texan,” I wrote. He texted back instantly in appreciation of the “raging boner” I’d given him, then said he felt awful about neglecting telephone duties. The fact was, he just couldn’t take my calls, or anyone’s, right now. There was never a time when he wasn’t caring for his sister or his niece or contending with a writing deadline.  

“You mean so much to me, and you’ve helped me to get through such an insane time,” he typed one day. “I can’t wait to come back to LA and drink a whole bottle of wine with you and make love to you because I do—love you, that is.”  

I realized that, after thirteen, going-on-fourteen weeks of consistent messaging, I loved him too. If money were no object, I might have flown out to surprise him, but as much as I wanted to hear his voice and touch him in the flesh, I’d have to be strong and hold off a bit longer. 

Bored at work one day, I opened an old email chain, changing the subject from “I MISS YOU!” (with too many capitals) to “Fly me out to see you!!!!!!!” (with too many exclamations). I told him the distance was torture, then signed off with, “Just kidding. You’re worth waiting for. I love you,” followed by lots of Xs and Os.  

A minute later, I had a new message. He must be sitting at his computer working on a script, I smiled to myself. But it wasn’t Matt. It was the Mail Delivery System. My message bounced back. That’s strange. I wonder if his inbox is full. But the Mail Delivery System didn’t offer to retry sending, as it sometimes does. It simply stated that delivery to the following recipient mattdavidson23 had failed permanently.  

Alarmed, I took out my phone and texted him, “Are you alright?” but that bounced back too. I dialed his number but got that funny three-note beeping sound before an automated voice told me, “The number you are trying to call has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.” I did what she suggested—I tried again—but his number had been saved in my phone for months. There was no way it could be the wrong one. There had to be some sort of mistake. Some terrible mix up.  

Luckily, my students were at recess, and I wasn’t on duty, so I could step away from my makeshift office and walk outside without abandoning anyone. I needed fresh air. I needed to breathe. To process. Immediately, my mind went through the worst possible scenarios. What if something horrible had happened to Matt? What if his sister snapped and came after him in her anguished-state—attacked him, even. Or, what if he followed in his male family members’ footsteps and “pulled a Davidson” himself—slitting his wrists “along the vein, not against it” because it was all too much to take? Was it also possible he’d reconciled with his ex-girlfriend? 

Never did I allow myself to consider that Matt might be pretending to be someone he wasn’t. Or that I might be the idiot—the pathetic, love-hungry girl—on the other end of an online romance, in which Matt used a false identity (and a fishing line dangled all the way from the Lone Star State) to catch his unsuspecting prey.   

I ran back to my office, heart pounding, and checked Texas obits for his name, just in case. My hands were shaking as I pressed the “Enter” key. Nothing. Thank God. Maybe hospitals? Suddenly, I couldn’t remember if he was in Houston or Dallas. Had he ever told me? Our love story was beginning to unravel. I practiced mouthing the words, “You’re craaaaazy”—feeling the shape my mouth took when it made that long “a” sound. Had he eeny, meeny, miny, moed me? Could I have been any brunette? 

Matt’s phone and email weren’t disconnected (I later realized) because he was lying in a Texas hospital bed, although he certainly was lying. Foolish as it seems in hindsight, he wasn’t too busy, too sad, or too “bald and goofy-looking,”—as he’d once joked—to Skype, meet face-to-face, or pick up the phone, either. He wasn’t even too “private,” like I’d initially rationalized. The reason he didn’t exist anywhere on the World Wide Web was because he didn’t exist at all, at least not as the Matt he’d portrayed.  

Maybe Matt, like love, was just an illusion: the stuff of make believe. Maybe it was all a mean-spirited joke. Maybe he was a really mature teenaged-boy or a tech-smart retiree. Or maybe he was in pain, and this was the only connection that felt safe—our pretend-romance, and his reinvention, holding him up and together. Maybe we are all stuck in Grief Cities of sorts. In today’s globally-warmed climate—a hotspot for fires; fascism; race riots; attempted coups; and (lest we forget) a worldwide pandemic—this is even more true: Each of us is traversing the streets, the stuff of life, as best we can, even if it means remaking or reimagining ourselves. Wouldn’t I do the same six years later when I moved to Canada to start over? Hadn’t I already done the same every time I sought out a new school, job, or relationship?   

I was grieving back then too: living in a shoebox of an apartment that I wished were a home, shared with a loving partner; repeating dangerous dating patterns in spite of a framed reminder to do better; hurting over old wounds, family ones, including a fractured relationship with both of my parents. What’s more, I already didn’t feel up to the task of teaching kids and suspected I wouldn’t last long in the field. (I was right.)   

I can only surmise that Matt connected with me for those very reasons—we were both doing the best we could to make sense of our lives through a shared narrative. To wade through the shit. To find our way out of grief.  

I wish him well, wherever he is; whoever he is.  

Melody Greenfield, who writes CNF and poetry, has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She has been published—both under her real and pen names—in Brevity, The Los Angeles Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Manifest-Station, Sledgehammer Lit, and the Jewish Literary Journal, among others, and she has been nominated for awards by Meow Meow Pow Pow (best small fiction award) and Kelp (best of the net), where her work has also appeared. Melody lives with her Canadian husband in LA, where she teaches Pilates, and he teaches elementary school. In her free time, she can be found reading, writing, singing, or watching a show on one of the streaming platforms—but always in her uniform of stretchy pants.