Last Girl Ghosted(14)

Click, click, the colorful Torch site fills my screen and another series of clicks brings up your profile. Nothing’s changed there either, just the same minimalist information that drew me to you in the first place. Your profile photo is so different from the other images—men with bare chests and flexed muscles, holding up big fish they’ve caught, or leaning on expensive cars, some holding hunting rifles, others running marathons. Posing in this ultramodern forum but sending the most ancient messages without even realizing it: I am strong; I can defeat predators; I can provide.

Not you. Yours is a just a grainy image of you staring intently into the camera, daring the viewer to look away. Somehow now, you don’t seem real. You’re a fiction I created. Nothing ties us together except the tenuous code of our meeting.

I take a couple more passes at your various outlets.

Social media stalking. It isn’t pretty.

Okay. Back to work.

I call my column and podcast Dear Birdie.

Come here, I tell my readers, and bring the thing you can’t bring anyplace else. I have seen it all, walked unimaginably dark passages, and I will use what I’ve learned there to help you navigate the horrors of being a human on this planet. No problem too big, too ugly, too strange, too terrifying. Bring it. We’ve got this. And you’re safe as long as you’re here.

It started as a blog I launched just after college, then grew bizarrely in popularity. In less than a year, I went from relative obscurity to having a kind of cult following, largely thanks to an article that ran after the death of a famous advice columnist, naming Dear Birdie as one of her younger, hipper heirs.

Major advertising money started pouring in as the blog grew and grew. After a while of publishing it on my own, an editor contacted me, asking if I would like to move it to the New York Chronicle—for the web and the print edition. The offer was good, much higher than I would have imagined; people who are reading little else apparently are still desperate for advice anywhere they can find it. I could hardly refuse.

Later, I started recording a podcast, which also became wildly popular. The success of it surprised everyone—most of all me. Now there’s talk of a television series, short fictional vignettes from some of my most popular installments. The money has been—significant.

And the real me, the person behind Dear Birdie, remains anonymous, unknown.

I don’t do interviews; I don’t make appearances. For a while only my editor, Liz, Robin, and Jax knew my real identity. Now, we have a growing staff and more people know that Dear Birdie is Wren Greenwood. But they’ve all signed nondisclosure agreements and want to keep their well-paying jobs. We’re a relatively young team so we haven’t had to deal with firings or disgruntled employees leaking my secret.

Actually, even you don’t know about Dear Birdie, Adam. Another layer. One, luckily, I chose not to peel back.

Now, there’s a staff at the Chronicle that vets the emails that Dear Birdie receives. When the blog was at its most popular and I was doing it alone, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of despair and horror, misery, hope, kindness, fear, true love, mental illness, heroism, rage. It was a deluge of humanity in which I almost drowned.

Robin always worried about this aspect of my vocation. Is this wise? Haven’t you been through enough?

“Sometimes helping others is how you help yourself,” I told her. That was true at first.

And sometimes they pull you under, she warned.

That had been about to become true before the Chronicle.

Now, my editor chooses, using whatever editorial criteria she applies to making sure we cover relevant topics, not too dark, not too light. It’s a gift, to cull and curate misery. Left to my own devices, I’d choose the most desperate, those with the most to lose, those about to be lost.

I’m the lifeline and I still want to help the people most desperate to reach Dear Birdie. After all, I’m usually their last resort.

The woman who was afraid her in-laws were poisoning her. Her hair was falling out.

The girl looking for her father who disappeared. She suspected her stepmother might have killed him, and that she might be next.

The mother who thought she saw her dead son in a crowd, and can’t stop following the man, even though she knows it’s not her son. The stranger had taken out a restraining order against her.

I worry about them. Sometimes I dream about them. Does that ever happen to you? Do you have dreams that you are not in, in which you are only the observer? It’s probably just me.

Pulling myself together, I sort through the emails my editor sent. My deadline for the column is tomorrow. And I am a punctual person; never late. Everything I turn in always perfect, no typos, no awkward sentences. Perfect, is my editor’s most common response. As ever.

I’m not going to let a breakup derail me.

I do what I always do. I print up the letters Liz has sent. I make a stack, close my eyes, and shuffle, picking at random. Then I start to read.

Dear Birdie,
I am a widow. My husband, the love of my life, died four years ago. And at the behest of my children, I recently started dating again. I have to be honest, at first I was just going through the motions. I think we only get one great love in our lives and I’ve already had mine. But my kids worry that I’m lonely, so they set me up on one of those dating apps. I’m still youngish, attractive enough—I think. I went on a couple of dates. But, no. Is it me? Or have people just become boring, self-involved, empty? I thought it was a lost cause.