The Unfollow Amnesia

Whenever someone unfollows me, I forget they existed.

I learned the rule in Portland when I accidentally unfollowed my sister.

I was clearing duplicate accounts while the kettle screamed. My thumb slipped. The profile vanished, and so did the reason I had been crying.

On my screen, a message thread remained, but the sender's name was blank. The replies were mine.

*Please don't come over while Owen is home.*

*I know how that sounds.*

*Give me until Friday.*

The other side was empty white space.

"Owen?" I called.

He came barefoot from the bedroom, already dressed for work above the waist. "What happened?"

"Do I have a sister?"

The pause was smaller than a blink.

"No," he said. "You always wished you did."

In our framed Christmas photo, my left arm curved around a blur.

Owen blamed an app update. He kissed my forehead, poured out the bitter tea, and reminded me that my migraines had been getting worse. Then he took my phone to "fix the sync."

I let him because Owen had become my default answer to every missing thing.

I worked from home restoring damaged library scans. I knew paper fibers, ink bleed, compression artifacts. A digital blur could be manufactured, but the framed photo had been printed two years earlier. Its emulsion now held a pale human-shaped fog.

At eleven, I searched our apartment.

The hall closet contained Owen's rain shell, my boots, and a cedar box labeled CHRISTMAS in my handwriting. He had stacked camping gear in front of it.

Inside were cards tied by year. Paper did not obey the rule.

*Mara and June—still impossible to tell apart from behind!*

*Tell Priya the cookies arrived.*

*Dinner with Luis after New Year's?*

Names struck nothing in me. No faces, no voices. But the cards established a life wider than the two mugs in our drying rack.

The newest envelope had no stamp.

*Mara, call me before he removes everyone. Love, June.*

A phone number followed in blue ink.

I photographed nothing. Digital evidence could change. Instead, I copied every name, address, and number into the back of an old conservation notebook. Forty-seven people.

At noon, Owen texted: *Feeling clearer?*

I wrote: *Much. You were right.*

My usual strategy was to analyze privately until no one could call me unreasonable. Owen loved that strategy. It kept every doubt silent until he could explain it away.

I checked the account activity log from my laptop. It listed unfollows at 2:13 a.m., 2:16, 2:19—nights when I had taken the sleep gummies Owen bought.

The device was identified as my phone.

That seemed to exonerate him until I remembered I did not remember taking the gummies. I checked the bottle. The seal had been cut and taped. I put one gummy in a paper coin envelope for a doctor, not a kitchen experiment.

Then I called the number on June's card from the library's landline.

A woman answered on the first ring.

"Hello?"

My body recognized her before my mind did. My knees weakened.

"This is Mara."

She inhaled sharply. "What did he delete?"

"You."

June cried once, then became practical. She told me the first disappearance had been Priya, my college roommate. Priya unfollowed me after Owen sent her a cruel message from my account. I forgot her before I could ask why.

Luis went next. Then my supervisor from the downtown branch. Then June's husband.

"I thought you were choosing him," June said. "Then last month you mailed me that card and told me not to contact you online."

"Why didn't you come?"

"I did. You called the police because you didn't know me."

The horror was not that Owen could erase people.

It was that he had made my fear of strangers enforce the erasure.

June had kept records: screenshots taken before each severed connection, dates of visits, copies of emails Owen sent while impersonating me. She would meet me at the Central Library at four, among cameras and people.

At three fifteen, Owen came home early.

He saw the Christmas box on the table.

"You shouldn't dig when you're disoriented," he said.

"Who is June?"

His face rearranged itself into concern. "A woman who became obsessed with you."

I held up the card. "She has my handwriting on an envelope."

"Anyone can copy handwriting."

He reached for my notebook. I closed it.

Owen's gentleness had always required my hands to be empty.

He opened my laptop and navigated to account settings with the confidence of repetition. "We can restore the connection if it calms you down."

A gray banner appeared:

**Restore all connections?**

Below it, my blocked list showed forty-seven blank entries.

At roughly sixty percent of my life—or maybe only of that afternoon—my thumb hovered over **Restore**. Owen stood close enough to stop me. His own profile was open in another tab. One click on **Unfollow**, and the fear attached to him might disappear too.