This Is Yr Life

Chapter Nine

Kyle did what he had done many nights before already, he scrolled through Chloe’s pictures. But this time, as much as he stared at Chloe, he also looked at her friends. He clicked through, picture by picture, event by event, birthday by birthday, and year by year.

They grew older, changed their hair, their fashions, they got tattoos and piercings and then took those piercings out and covered the tattoos up. They had boyfriends and girlfriends that either disappeared completely or later hung about in the background of the photographs, watching the camera.

And next to these faces of friends there were names. There were names that hung encased in black rectangles next to ears or eyes on perched on shoulders or sometimes fastened to their chests like Hi! My name is... badges.

For some of her friends, their names were so long that the final few letters were obscured by ellipses. He zoomed in on these, just to see the whole name, just to know them more, as if you can tell anything about a person by their name and a photograph.

Underneath the names there was a chain of messages and words, which Kyle read, also. These comments wouldn’t say much. Mostly, they were just yellow smiling faces, yellow faces laughing so hard they were crying. Kyle remembered these images from when he was at school, seeing them on other people’s social pages when they spoke to each other. It was like hieroglyphics. Conveying meaning and conversing without words. He too had used them when getting tagged in funny pictures and videos. It became a way to acknowledge someone thinking of you without starting a conversation. Over time, these tags started to slow until he would go days and weeks without any interaction on his social accounts. Eventually, he stopped using it all together, except to check up on people who drifted into his head without knowing why.

When Kyle thought of these people, he didn’t question why he may have thought of them. But still he would search their names, and scroll through pictures. He saw graduations and holidays but also he saw pictures of people who were not them but instead cartoons or pets or just images of anonymous quotes.

These profiles were more interesting to Kyle than those who stories were there for the whole world to see. There would be an occasional self-portrait, somewhere in between Japanese cartoon girls or dragons or just stock scenery, borrowed from image message boards and thought to convey some idea of adventure, of the unknown, of wishing to be anywhere else.

But mainly, there were just these pictures where Kyle could imagine what they did with their lives instead of merely showing it off, giving everyone all the answers.

Kyle had sat in his room at his parents’ house in front of his computer and next to his mini fridge which was packed with ice-cold water and cans of soda; no beer. He sat and scrolled and thought about these people who he only vaguely remembered from the early years of school. They were people without faces, just bodies in uniform. The girls all had pigtails and the boys all had their hair cut short along the sides and longer on top, where their mothers gelled it for them before they left the house. They had matching school bags and shoes and socks that were pulled high up the shins.

Kyle had a similar haircut at that age. He looked at his reflection in his mirror across the room. He had gone through different styles during his life. He had shaved it all off when he moved schools, just to see how long he could grow it out again, then cut that off when it was shoulder length and took too long to dry in the morning. After that, he had grown it again but this time only down to his ears with a fringe that hung heavy over his eyes and gave him migraines. The sides always got shorter the older he got. During his last year at school he shaved it around the sides but kept the length on top, like the boys he remembered when he was younger.

When he started his first job, they told him he needed to cut it all off, and so he did. He kept this style for years, cutting it himself, or asking his mother to do it, to save going to the barber.

Now, he looked at himself. His hair was too long around the sides and it gave this illusion that his head was twice the size. He needed a haircut, he knew, but even though he walked past one every night after work, he never walked in. He wasn’t sure if he needed an appointment or not and there were always too many people sitting down, no doubt also waiting for a haircut and how much would it cost, anyway, and he hated the small talk. A barbershop still had need for human workers, people had not taken to the robotic conversations happily.

These were the excuses he made.

On one picture, a group photograph that was taken just two months before Chloe died with everyone, it seemed, there and Chloe in the middle next to a girl with big black hair and white teeth. Behind them all, and there must have been about fifteen, Kyle thought, the sun was setting and the clouds were purple and orange. Everyone was cheering something, like when they had their pictures taken at birthdays in their youth, where the photographer asked them to say ‘cheese’ or something else that forced their mouths to spread into an inauthentic smile. But these smiles looked real.

The girl next to Chloe was a girl called Summer. The same girl that Chloe had dived from an aeroplane with and landed in a mess of fabric. Summer was in a lot of photos with Chloe.

And the rest of the people in the picture whose names he was now starting to recognise. Shaun, Ralph, Kirsten, Luke, Rebecca. These were just some, but all the names were there, levitating inside black rectangles.

He wondered where they were now. He wondered why they, like Chloe’s family, did not visit her grave. He wondered if they were also still hurt from the loss or had just left the city.

Kyle clicked on Summer’s name. It brought up her page where her picture was one of her and Chloe that he had seen a thousand times already. The two of them, sat on a bench in the sun and both holding ice cream that had already started to melt and wearing sunglasses and shorts and Chloe sporting an orange t-shirt that she had cut the sleeves off of. Summer was wearing a dark blue denim shirt. They both wore white shoes with no laces.

In the corner of the photo, a small white dog sniffed at the grass, its owner out of frame.

And behind them was a glass dome that Kyle recognised as a place in the capital that he had seen on TV. It had opened two years ago. His sister had visited and invited him, but Kyle had told her he was working that weekend.

This hadn’t been true, but she wanted him to meet her new boyfriend, the first one after she had broken up with her fiance, almost husband. He had hadn’t liked many of her boyfriends. But her fiance was one he had enjoyed. They sat at family dinners talking about travelling. He had gone everywhere, it seemed. He hadn’t gone to university here, but instead had studied in Europe and then South America. He had worked on safaris in Africa.

But now, Kyle couldn’t even remember his name.

The dome had been built to save the planet. Inside, Kyle heard, they had plants and wildlife from all over the world. His sister had posted the pictures online. There were palm trees and cacti and trees where the branches hung low, almost to the ground. Kyle had expected it all to be green, but there were purples and reds and yellows, too. His sister had her picture taken with a bird half the size of her fist perched on her hat.

Kyle scrolled down. On Summer’s page were pictures and videos and those little laughing faces again. She used to post a lot, he saw, but recently, within the last couple of months, she had gone quiet. Only responding here and there.

And then, he came to a picture of Chloe.

Underneath the picture was a message filled with spelling errors and long sentences that switched from subject to subject. At the end, it simply said ‘Goodbye’.

Going back to the top, Kyle clicked on her pictures and from there he just went. He tapped through and through, jumping past any picture he had seen before. He saw one with Summer sat besides the lion statues in the centre of town, which Buzz and Jake had climbed on and pretended to ride more than once on their lunch breaks, or on the weekends where all they could do was walk around town. But this photograph of Summer was taken a month ago. Next to her in this picture was Shaun. They held shopping bags and were wrapped up in scarves and hats and Shaun had his arm around Summer.

He went to Shaun’s page where it said he worked at a bar in the centre of town. From Shaun’s page, he found Ralph and from Ralph, Rebecca, Luke, Hamish, Charlotte, Lydia, another Rebecca.

This second Rebecca had posted an event for this coming Friday with everyone invited. Kyle clicked on the link and it was a picture of a bar that he knew and had been to a long time ago somewhere along the main road in the city. Summer, Shaun, Ralph, they had said they were coming, and they filled the comments with how excited they all were to go.

So they were all still in the city.

He thought what it would be like to meet them.

Yes, he thought. He should meet them.

Later, after darkness had descended and he had heard Lewis and Finn go to bed, he found himself back at Chloe’s page. There were no new messages from people who missed her since the last time he had visited just two days ago. He reread the messages already there and then, he did something that he had not done before, not even considered, but looking through the pictures of her friends somehow made him feel like he had learned more about Chloe than he knew already.

He tapped the little button that looked like a bubble, it brought him to a page where Chloe’s picture sat in the top left-hand corner, her full name bolded next to it and underneath in smaller print it read: offline.

Kyle’s picture was in the bottom right. It was an old picture of him standing at a window looking out at the photographer, half smiling. He could not remember who took the photo, but he had liked it enough to use it to represent his whole self. He was about nineteen years old in this photograph. The window was that of a house that had been empty during his youth for as long as he could remember. It didn’t exist anymore, it had been torn down and replaced with a high-rise of apartment buildings. There used to be grass, you could see some at the bottom of the frame but now along with the abandoned house, it too was gone and replaced with pebbles and fake foliage that didn’t need any attention aside from those who saw it and thought it looked nice enough to point out to their friends. It added a bit of colour to the area that at night was illuminated by a blinding light so that nobody thought of breaking in, loitering, or even merely throwing empty packets of cigarettes or food on the floor.

He knew it was done for a college project someone had asked him to help with, someone who he didn’t speak to anymore.

Kyle looked at the blank non-conversation before him. He tapped the keyboard three times.

                                                                                                                                                                                   Kyle Edwards just now

                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Hey