What year is it?

This is what being able to look back on 20 years of your life does to you.

Nate’s mom is spending her days digging up photos of our childhood. We text every day, because I am putting together the slideshow for Nate’s funeral, and maybe because when we stop texting each other every day, we will be in a new, somehow sadder, phase.

She finds pictures of me, Nate, and Claire lying on the floor of Nate’s bedroom, taking pictures of our braces and our side bangs. We’re taking selfies in the mirror with a digital camera. Going to dances. Wearing Halloween costumes. Burning our SAT prep books. Graduating. Wearing college sweatshirts and rain jackets in front of a Christmas tree. Meeting Nate’s parents for dinner in a Los Feliz restaurant. Wendi puts them all on our shared Google Drive that holds pictures of Nate. This folder is a portal to another world. I can enter it at any time. Leaving it is harder.

I am mesmerized in this specific, cliché way. Were we ever that young? I think. And: Nate is right there. Why can’t I call him? In high school he and I made a slideshow for our graduation ceremony, because we were the yearbook editors. Is that happening now, or was that the past? It feels, almost, exactly the same. I find a 2017 gchat from him, in which we imagine he is from the future and telling me what will happen to me. ~ Nate will be gay ~ he writes. ~ Yearbook isn’t as important as you are going to think that it is ~ Claire and Zach will date ~ Donald Trump will be our president ~

He doesn’t tell me that I am going to move to San Francisco and live in a high-ceilinged townhouse with his ex-boyfriend, Tommy, and we are going to summit with Claire in 2022 and call our friends who are therapists and figure out how to get him to rehab. He doesn’t say that the rehab won’t work, or why. He doesn’t tell me that I am going to have to call Tommy and tell him that he’s dead. Thank God I have Tommy. You know when your gay ex-boyfriend dies, and you call his ex-boyfriend every morning to cry about it? No? I feel like I’m a military wife who lost my husband in war, but I was pregnant with his baby, and the baby is Tommy, I text Claire. I tell Tommy this, wondering if it will land. It doesn’t. What? he laughs. I think I have stopped making sense to anyone but me and Claire.

Take me back to 2005, I write on my Instagram story next to one of the pictures. We are all lying on the floor on the blue carpet and I am kissing Claire’s cheek and she is laughing. On Instagram, I add the HAIM song, “Take Me Back,” that Claire loved as soon as it came out earlier this summer but I didn’t. Oh, now she likes Take Me Back, Claire texts me, and it’s like we’re on the floor of Nate’s bedroom again. I am 34 and my best friend still knows what songs I’m skipping on my new CDs. We are still talking on the phone for hours at a time, our feet up on the wall.

I have never wondered who you are, she writes as we dive to the bottom of a 20-year digital archive of our existence. I endure the cringe of reading my old journal entries and see that she is right. I have been obsessing over some queer person who’s kind of mean and writing my little articles and getting bangs since I was fourteen years old.

At night I dream that Nate’s still alive. When I wake up, I don’t know what’s going on or what year I am living in. Some days, I don’t leave the house. I don’t need to. My life happens inside a computer. When I write my SEO articles for my freelance gig I have to remove the em dashes otherwise the computer will think I am also a computer. I long ago stopped reading the news, because whenever I do, it’s like The government is getting rid of medicine. The Supreme Court approves racism as national policy. More drawings of boobs declassified. I feel like that Jia Tolentino article, “My Brain Finally Broke.” I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor, she writes. I sometimes look up words after I write them: does “illegible” still mean too messy to read? I am 34 and I never became Jia Tolentino, and I probably won’t, and none of it really matters because Nate is dead and I think we might be losing control of everything.

If I die delete this playlist. That’s the name of a playlist Nate made in 2024 when he heard a song we loved when we were fourteen—“Beating Heart Baby”—playing as he passed a bar. I thought we were the only two people who knew of that song, he wrote. I rediscovered this message from him after I posted my little Instagram carousel about his death and added that exact song to the post. I second-guessed it after I posted it. Was this the right song? I thought. Did he even like this song? I couldn’t remember. Now I see that it was perfect. I wonder how Nate became a person who didn’t care if he died. Now we are deleting his dick pics so his mom doesn’t have to see them.

I start to realize the volume of things someone would need to delete if I died. Should I try to tidy it all up now just in case? I get overwhelmed and decide this has to be something I let go because it’s too big and impossible to control. Here’s the extent of my planning. If I die, delete: my Notes app, three plastic buckets of journals, my screenshots of comments I left on strangers’ posts about Israel (both sides), my work crusading for common-sense local politics, my text threads with everyone.

How silly of me to have once cared about anything, I think. In digital retrospect, I am the most cringe when I am trying to exert control over the world. As I am wondering if I’m just depressed, Ezra Klein and David Wallace-Wells discuss the death of Americans’ belief in politics on a podcast about the aftermath of the pandemic that helped Nate drink himself into oblivion. I think there’s a sense that politics failed, Ezra says, on the left’s post-pandemic shift away from movements and toward individualism. It’s not just me. We are in a new era. We are all receding into ourselves. I am in danger of drowning. I wonder if grieving Nate’s death has freed me to be the drama queen I have always secretly wanted to be, and decide it’s not a good thing. You’re not supposed to gaze at your digital reflection for hours at a time. You’re supposed to grow up. Is that what this is?

Personal growth is kind of like getting hit in the face with a frying pan, my new colleague writes to me. We are both freelancers figuring out how to sell—I just typed cell—cell-cultivated chicken. Her partner lost his girlfriend at 35 and said that to her. It’s like I can feel my perspective rearranging itself, I write, and she reminds me that before caterpillars become butterflies they turn into disgusting slop inside their cocoons. I just typed cuckoons.

The thing about being able to gaze at yourself at this level of zoom—I can review what I said to Nate, and when, and if it’s a voice memo, how I said it, and then I can go to my journal and see if what I felt matched what I said, and then I can look at the pictures and see if one of us was side-eyeing the other, and on and on—is that it creates the illusion of control. I can navigate to any point in time and peek in. If I can do that, I must be powerful. Did Nate die because I left him on read that one time? Because I didn’t leave him alone when he came out? Because I lived with Tommy later? But as recently as last year, he was texting me that he still cared about me. Even before rehab, he was leaving me on read. Look, here are the receipts.

I truly don’t think there’s a single thing you did or said that you should believe contributed to what happened, my sister writes to me. I am self-aware enough to understand that what she’s saying is actually scarier than Nate’s death being my fault. If it were my fault, I could have controlled it.

But the truth is, we never had any control, at least not on an individual level. Maybe on the other side of this, I will have become someone who doesn’t just know that is true, but feels that it is true. Maybe that’s the kind of grown-up wisdom you need to survive a pandemic and mass addiction and the changing of the political guards. Maybe that’s what we have all been trying to outrun.