Digital Resurrection

I don't know why I answered. His name hadn't appeared on my phone in three years. 'Zombie' was what we called it - when someone you'd buried deep suddenly messaged, coming back to life like the walking dead. There it was: Ethan's name glowing on my iPhone screen at 2 AM. Heartbeat. Open. Delete. Repeat. A digital haunting I couldn't escape. Three years of silence, broken by: 'I saw you were in LA last weekend.'

I should have ignored it. Instead I found myself typing back. We met for coffee, then dinner, then those desperate hotel room encounters that felt like trying to restart a dead engine. He was different now - obsessed with wellness, carrying a pill case of vitamins he took with religious precision. 'My therapist says I need to heal,' he said, swallowing a handful with our second glass of wine. I wanted to laugh. We were both dead inside, just different levels of rotting.

The papaya he ordered for breakfast became a weapon. When he told me about his new girlfriend, I speared a piece of the fruit, letting its sweetness mask the bitterness in my mouth. 'You look good,' he said, reaching for my hand across the table. 'Different.' I pulled away. The vitamins were working, apparently. He was healing, moving forward, resurrected. I was still the same ghost, haunting the same places, waiting for messages from dead things.

Back home, I deleted his contact again. Then restored it. Then deleted it. My iPhone held both of us - every message, every photograph, every digital artifact of three years of loving someone who learned to love again only after leaving me. The zombie had moved on. I remained, stuck in the space between alive and dead, nourished only by the papaya-sweet memory of being someone's reason to heal.