We haven’t spoken in months, yet she’s first on the scene when I post an Instagram story. She sits behind the one-sided glass, watching me while I can only see myself.

I read Personal Scriptures’ ‘The Intimacy of Never Talking Again’ and wondered if I feel closer to her now or when I had her hair between my teeth. Anne Carson wrote of memory and signs in her poem ‘Wildly Constant’; her words remind me that if the glove of a lost loved one can undo us, so can an Instagram “on this day”.

Despite TikTok pseudo-psychologists and relationship coaches urging “no contact” after a break-up, I scroll back through voice notes and DMs – my own melted-glacier library, each fragment lit from underneath.

Image by: Huyen Pham

We tend to think of digital interactions as ephemeral because we can’t hold them like letters, and can’t feel the weight of a photo album in gigabytes. But the idea that this makes them less real is absurd.

I want to look closely at what we’re building as queer people in digital spaces: what love, longing and traditions we’re preserving, and how older mediums still live alongside our feeds.

Handwritten love letters, postcards and zines once carried desire across long stretches of time and distance; now it travels instantly by email, message, voice note or playlist. In queer communities, the romance of analogue persists: zine clubs and archives, personal ads and handwritten notes slipped into books. These forms demand time and care, their tangibility becoming part of the message. They are not just delivery systems, but objects to hold, reread and keep.

By contrast, our digital exchanges can feel fleeting, lost in crowded inboxes, buried in the relentless scroll. Yet even the most transient “view once” message or shared link is still a vulnerable gesture: Here I am, thinking of you.

I keep asking myself whether the medium changes the meaning.

Does the weight of a page give the words more gravity, or is it the attention that matters? Is there an urgency to the digital, and do we still leave room to yearn?

Weighing an email against an empty postcard scented with her perfume, I find that the blank page contains more of her than the four pages of text on my screen.

However, in time, her scent will degrade, and maybe I will return to my inbox search bar to find her again.

My identity as a queer person has shifted and sharpened over the years, especially in the last three, after ending a long-term relationship.

Coming out of pandemic lockdowns, I noticed a surge of lesbian representation online and in the media. I felt like half the women I knew, or half the women I followed online, were suddenly gay.

My feed was full of Peach PRC, Renee Rapp, Chappell Roan, Gaylor theorists, and women making jokes about leaving boyfriends for their best friend. Some people blamed lesbian TikTok. Others blamed the poor behavior of men. For me, it was time to choose a life that I truly wanted to live. Seeing other women realise this for themselves helped me to do the same.

The internet gave me the tools: I could set my dating apps to women only. I could follow queer creators, and join group chats that spoke to who I was becoming.

With every sapphic playlist or Co–Star compatibility screenshot, I felt closer to myself.

There’s an email, over ten years old, that I still open from time to time. It’s from one of the first people who helped me actualise my queerness.

Our relationship was complicated, and I was confused and scared. But rereading it now is a kind of validation: proof that I didn’t imagine it. That I was already here, even then.

This is what digital memory allows: to time travel, to hold multiple versions of myself at once, and feel whole. I’m grateful for the fragments I’ve kept.

One of my relationships hinged on a deleted message. She didn’t read it in the time I wanted her to, so I erased it before she could. That silence revealed an incompatibility – one we’d always known was there, but could no longer ignore.

Digital communication carries a strange urgency, a reminder of how fragile it is. If everything can vanish in an instant, what actually remains?

Despite the cautionary saying that “the internet never forgets”, much does slip away. Most ordinary content was never built for long-term archiving or preservation. A friend told me she felt grief when Skype shut down in May 2025, because it meant losing old conversations with her ex and other significant people in her life.

Sometimes I’m relieved when the past disappears, like my angsty MySpace profile, or desperate messages written before my brain had finished developing. Other times, I feel a sharp longing when I discover a corrupted file, a piece of my history that’s irretrievably gone.

Letters and postcards aren’t immune to loss either: they can be misplaced in a move, smudged beyond recognition by water, or burned. But even their destruction feels different – more tactile, more final.

Digital loss, by contrast, is ghostly. It leaves you wondering if what you lost might still exist somewhere in a server, just beyond reach.

In her poem, Carson quotes artist Roni Horn, to say ravens are a sign of something that endures even as everything shifts.

My digital fragments feel like that – wildly constant – even as they vanish from platforms, expire or corrupt. They remind me that permanence is not the measure of intimacy. Whether it’s a letter that yellows with age or a message that blinks out after being read, both are signs of presence, proof of a moment lived.

When she watches my story without speaking, it’s not forever. It doesn’t need to be. It’s simply another small, persistent sign.