Mark Zuckerberg Never Wrote Back

Facebook deleted my account about a month ago—deactivated, banned, scrubbed, whatever verb they use for making a person vanish from their platform. No explanation, no functional appeal process, just: gone. I spent the first few days feeling righteous about it. Then I played video games that were already outdated when I bought them and stared out the window a lot. By week three I was composing increasingly desperate mental letters to Zuckerberg that I obviously never sent.

Here’s the thing about hating Facebook: you have to be inside it to do it properly. The contempt only works from within the building. Outside, you’re just talking to yourself in a room with no furniture.

So I re-registered. Which is almost certainly a terms of service violation, and I’m sure there’s a server room somewhere in Palo Alto with a cell reserved for me—bread, water, one bar of Wi-Fi. But honestly? The relief of being able to throw a thumbs-up at someone’s midnight selfie again was almost embarrassing. That’s what a month of exile does to a person.

Now I need to fill the friends list back up. People who’ll blast FarmVille requests at seven in the morning, post close-up photos of their feet as an inexplicable life update, run secret group chats about their employers. The ones whose faces visit my dreams occasionally, in ways I’ll only admit because no one reads this far anyway. Come say hello.