In Bloom

Elena Megalos scrolls Instagram for images of a relationship that might have been, in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Elena MegalosAugust 25, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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THE FIRST BOY I loved became a father the year I gave birth to my second child. This wasn’t information that I learned in a phone call. We had not remained friends. Apart from occasional birthday texts—ones that I, admittedly, initiated—we were not in touch. I did, however, learn his happy news on my phone.

For many years, his presence on the internet had been minimal. Throughout the late aughts, when Facebook membership mattered among the young, he’d abstained from joining. This was a blessing in the aftermath of our college breakup. A window into the beginning of his adult life would have been irresistible and painful.

A decade later, not long after marrying my longtime boyfriend, I was lying comfortably on the grown-up couch we’d purchased for our grown-up apartment and scrolling Instagram, my feed a pleasurable mix of artists, memes, and real-life people I’d known or knew still. Suddenly, violently, there he was: the first boy I’d loved. Arm extended to snap a selfie against the backdrop of another country’s greenery, an amorous companion nestled against his chest. The source wasn’t his account, which was largely out-of-date; it was his partner who had posted the photo.

The girl he now loved—she was a woman, of course, not a girl—was an illustrator, famous enough that I followed her online without actually knowing her. I’d done so for years, and was familiar with her work, her wardrobe, the supplies and tchotchkes on her desk, the tasteful furniture in her home, just six miles and an entire universe from my own.

Like nearly 40,000 other strangers who admired her drawings and looked at her mirror selfies, I’d maintained the illusion of intimacy with this woman. For years, I thought of her as a successful, stylish peer. In more deluded moments, as a kindred spirit. I was no professional, but I loved the same obscure picture books she loved, and I drew pictures too. It was in part thanks to following artists like her on social media that I persisted in believing I might one day spend my days as she did.

Now she was in love—the love of her life!—and she wanted to share her joy. How could she have known the effect of her post on one of her thousands of anonymous fans? The jolt she would cause by letting him into her story and onto my feed? It wasn’t just jarring that my history with him predated hers; it was that my history with her predated his.

Before he entered the frame, the first boy I’d loved had been a ghost to me, preserved at 17—at once exalted and hobbled by my inability to imagine him beyond this formative time, the years that carried us from the West Coast to the East, speaking with earnest certainty of the adult life we would someday share and the children we would someday raise. Periodically, he still appeared to me in dreams, but this moonlit projection of a boy who hadn’t existed in ages—who, maybe, had never existed in the first place—made him less real, not more.

She hadn’t been real to me either. Yes, I’d watched curated evidence of her life unfolding and her career progressing, but like an influencer, she’d existed in an untouchable category. She was a fantasy I escaped to when I was bored or distracted, waiting for my subway home. I knew her no better than I knew the commuter hunched beside me, scrolling away on a device of their own.

When my first love began appearing on her account, he was no longer a ghost. He was right in her kitchen, at her party, his feet grazing the edge of her bed. He was participating in the world of now and I got to watch; sometimes, I was even given the coordinates.

She was real now too: a three-dimensional person whom, of all the people in the world, he had chosen. She had a body, one that knew intimately well the first body I’d loved. In this way, unbeknownst to her, we were connected.

Every photograph she shared, even those she’d posted before meeting him, was now charged with significance. The loaf of bread he’d baked in Los Angeles and shipped overnight so that she could enjoy it in New York. The hilly cobblestone streets they walked abroad, hand in hand. The dog with which he played peekaboo while she recorded them from an unmade bed. The set of custom stationery she designed for him, spaghetti forming the same initials I’d doodled in the margins of high school notebooks. The strawberry tart and espressos with which they celebrated their eventual elopement.

Why was I allowed to know?

It felt troubling and personal. I studied her glamorous life—so far away, but deceptively proximal—and the contrasts that had once sparked inspiration now shrank me. The gallery where she celebrated a book launch and an art show was a stone’s throw from the school where I worked as an English teacher, pouring most of my energy into the creations of my students. It was only a block away from the home goods shop where I sold my own illustrations at a fraction of the price her work commanded. Our similarities, her nearness, seemed to suggest that a few tweaks—braver choices at moments I’d been too timid—might have collapsed the space between us.

I wondered if a bolder, shinier life would compel me to broadcast my joy as recklessly and relentlessly as she did.

I unfollowed her. I removed the app from my phone’s home screen. This made my roundabout efforts to steal glimpses feel all the more shameful. Her profile was public; I had only to search her name (one letter typed and it appeared straightaway) and tap her circular icon (that fuchsia active-story ring seemed almost always to hover) to peer in.

I didn’t dare discuss the habit with friends, much less my husband. Sometimes I role-played a higher self, pretending this other me was a childhood friend I would never abandon but whose treachery frustrated me to no end. Get a grip, I urged her. What, exactly, are you waiting for? Is your own life so small and unsatisfying?

My life was satisfying. I’d met my life partner. I loved him; I’d married him! Our lives were full; they were, in fact, expanding. They were also contracting.

Within several months of stumbling into their romance, I was pregnant. Like each of my prior commitments, this one had involved years of deliberation and planning. There had been no surprise, no leap of spontaneity. I’d always craved certainty; I’d felt this way about marriage too. But parenthood would be different, I knew: a choice I couldn’t take back. The alternate realities, however unlikely they’d ever been, would vanish. Life would progress from this one branch I’d decided upon, a branch that would yield unexpected outgrowths, of course, but there would be no leaping from this bough to those other what-ifs. I may as well have taken a hacksaw to them.

It was difficult, in the early months of pregnancy, not to experience it as the countdown to an ending. I had a deadline and really did believe that whatever I failed to accomplish before my due date might never happen. I couldn’t help but view what I had as all I’d ever have. Their beginning felt like my ending.

Soon enough, though, my body reminded me that pregnancy—for all the ways I was determined to frame it—was not conceptual. What I’m saying is—the baby started making its presence known. It started to kick.

How I wish I could report that, having survived this descent, I returned home in one piece, chastened and more self-aware. That I left the happy couple alone and never looked back.

That is and isn’t what happened. I didn’t stop peering, periodically, into their lives, but my orientation toward them changed. As they transitioned to something quieter, deeper, more steadfast and mysterious, I transitioned too.

I’d never been one to take pictures of myself, but I experienced a sudden urge to bear witness. It wasn’t just my changing reflection that felt worthy of documentation: it was a meal my husband had cooked me, the messy tabletop on which I’d finished a drawing, a tree in bloom on my way to work. I’d catch myself openly grinning, keenly aware that I was in the midst of something, a state that would not so much end as evolve and keep evolving.

At 32, I was 17 again, falling in love for the very first time. I was in the throes of courtship, and everything shimmered.

This was what she had shown me, I realized. What had startled, pained, and consumed me. She had documented and broadcast her state of falling, one that so happened to involve the object of my own original fall. And she did it well, falling in love. With the man who would become her husband, yes, but it didn’t stop there. She’d fallen in love with the streets of New York City, its unorthodox inhabitants, with her brilliant friends, a pair of shoes, a plate of shrimp, with—above all else—the contents of her imagination, inked on paper. “Fell in love” makes it sound fixed, like these were solitary acts she concluded, when really it was more continuous than this. She was, to my admiring eye, in a constant state of falling.

This had drawn me to her account in the first place, years before she’d even met him. It was what made her life look like art, and her art come alive. It was her secret, and it was available to us all. We, too, could love what we had; we, too, could celebrate it exuberantly.

Not long after the birth of my second son, she posted a mirror selfie. In it, she posed in profile, her unbuttoned blouse and fitted skirt accentuating the new shape of her stomach. Quick arithmetic confirmed it: my final month of pregnancy had been her first.

So here we were. Another ending, another beginning, another story that was both and neither. I wouldn’t push this one away. I would follow, with affection, as she continued to illuminate the places I knew well and the places I would never know.

I set down my phone. My baby was nursing. I didn’t want to miss it.

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Featured image: Illustration by Elena Megalos.