I check the profile maybe twice a week. I don't think of it as checking. I think of it as the phone being in my hand and something opening and there he is, smiling in a place I don't recognize with people I don't know. It takes about two minutes. I scroll a little. I close it. I go back to whatever I was doing before, which is now slightly different, the way a room changes when someone walks through it even briefly.

He seems fine. Better than fine. There are photos from a trip and a dinner and a concert and the general texture of a life moving forward. This is information I did not need. I assembled it anyway from the public record of his ongoing existence, the way water finds cracks without being asked. I closed the app. An hour later I opened it again to check if anything had changed in the last hour. Nothing had. Of course nothing had.

The grief was finite. The access is infinite. Those two things are incompatible and the access wins every time. A breakup used to mean the person receded. You stopped knowing things. The absence was real and the not-knowing eventually let the attachment dissolve. Now the not-knowing is impossible unless you take deliberate steps I haven't taken. I still know exactly what he looks like on a Tuesday in October.

There's a specific texture to this kind of grief that I don't have a name for. Not missing him. Not wanting him back. Just the strange ongoing knowledge of him - the updates arriving unrequested, the face I carry now whether I want to or not. I think about blocking. I don't. How long have you been carrying someone you technically have no reason to carry anymore?