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Because I needed something to fill the gap of your absence, I typed your name on the Google search bar and waited for the search results to appear in five…four…three…two…one. Dangerous territory. I half-hoped half-feared that a Google search of your name would yield a blog your goldfish memory might have forgotten about. A blog filled with old pictures of you and entries that might yield more insight on the way you think and view the world (which was exactly what I wanted to find), or a declaration of love for the woman in your life a year or two ago (which was what the eternally irrationally jealous part of me was afraid of finding).

Instead, I find that you are a forty-year old fashion photographer based in Rome. Your Linked In profile says you are a General Financial Supervisor at the Ferrabraz-Becker Group and that you graduated from a university in Brazil. You have also worked with John Malkovich in the 1991 film The Object of Beauty.

I went through pages and pages of search results and kept seeing your name minus the traces of the you that I know.

The internet has it all wrong. You have a film camera in your room somewhere that you haven’t used in years. You’re a linguistics major who graduated from the University of Milan and you wrote a 65-page thesis on the pidgins and creoles of (insert north African country whose name I can’t remember here - but I do remember that if you had had more time, you would have flown over to north Africa yourself to get your sample from the native pidgin speakers instead of interviewing every black immigrant you stopped on the street). You’d sooner become a right wing party member than get a career in finance (or maybe it’s the other way around - either way, I can’t imagine you in a suit and tie). You watch movies with your parents every night but you’ve never expressed the desire to make them. I do know that sometimes, you wish you had gone to med school instead.

My knowledge of you versus the world’s largest repository of information. I’m better off sleeping your absence away.