Breaking Up, the Gmail Way

It all began with
one e-mail.

After I stopped
speaking to my ex, I wanted to send her an anonymous
note. So I opened a Gmail account using what I thought was a
cleverly disguised pseudonym: a portion of my last
name spelled backward. The sole purpose was to send
her this line: “There will always be a pure and
beautiful angel watching over you.”

I was cautious
about making contact with her, since two weeks before I
sent the e-mail I received a threatening letter from her
lawyer telling me never to contact her again. The
lawyer cited two recent occasions when I had left
flowers for her at her doorstep as examples of the type of
contact she didn’t want. She had gotten an attorney
involved just to annoy me -- I had done nothing
legally questionable.

A week later, as
if nothing had happened, we were in the car, on our way
to having yet another
dragging-the-relationship-out-beyond-logic dinner,
because neither one of us had the guts to end the mutually
destructive thing it had become. Suddenly she turned
to me with a big grin and said, “Jenny, I know
everything about what you’ve been up to lately.
Everything. After I got that e-mail from you” -- I
was chagrined to know she had figured it out so easily
-- “I guessed your password and got into your
Gmail account.”

I gulped.

“How’s the Lesbotronic dating service working
for you?” she asked.

My mind careened
as I tried to recall how much of my brain had been
downloaded and syndicated for her viewing pleasure -- in
anyone’s Gmail account, you can read a detailed
record of whatever that person has Googled just by
clicking the “Web history” link. So what if we
had shared a bed for five years? I would never have
shown anyone my Google searches.