Illustration by the author.

I got a new phone for my birthday, and, although phones now set themselves up through the mysterious sorcery of The Cloud, it felt like the right moment to clear out my contacts.

My contact list has transferred over from phone to phone since I was in college. Somehow, some contacts had duplicated themselves, so I had like eight “Aaron Tinder”s glaring at me every time I opened my contact list — and I have no memory of going on a Tinder date with anyone named Aaron.

Phones are like little houses we carry around, and so they’re rife with organizing potential. I like to organize my apps by color, which is also how I like to organize the books on my actual bookshelf. I like to edit my photo library when I’m on an airplane without WiFi. But preening my contact list is something I’d never done. It felt like too much work. There is no easy way to do it directly from your phone; you have to individually open each contact and delete it. Who has time for that?

There’s a way to do it faster from a computer (here’s a How-To, for iPhone users), which is what I learned by Googling. This felt doable, and I took it on. Immediately, I could tell that the task was going to be more psychologically affecting than anything else. But it felt like it would be in a good way.

I like organizing things. I like taking all the books down, holding them, considering them, and putting them back in an order that makes sense to me. I could spend hours “organizing” my old diaries, which is really just an excuse to re-read them and think about how critically important things once seemed — things that I now, invariably, can’t even remember. Odd, then, that it took me 20 years to address this digital undertaking of looking through a bunch of names. Well, mostly names.

In my looking and deleting, I also came upon the following numbers with labels in my phone:

• “This is not the gynecologist I want”
• “I think pizza”
• “Steve’s nephew who has questions about Whitman”
• “NOT SPAM!”
• “Call this number to find out who put it in your phone”

I didn’t call that number, by the way. It has been so long since I have done anything where a stranger would flirtatiously put a mystery number in my phone that I knew exactly how the conversation would go:

ME: I called this number because you put it in my phone.

THEM: Who are you?

ME: Sophie.

THEM: Who?

ME: Sophie Goalson. Well, it used to be Sophie Lucido Johnson. Or just Sophie Johnson. I don’t know. This number was in my phone and it said to call it.

THEM: ….

ME: It was probably a long time ago.

THEM: I think you have the wrong number?

I deleted all five of those ones. I also deleted everyone whose last name was “Tinder” or “OK Cupid” — because the dates that stuck are in my phone with more permanent last names now, and I don’t have time for Tinder or OK Cupid anymore. But I remembered when I did, and I thought about my catalogue of bad-dates-gone-by. The guy whose lips were cold and wet — like a fish from a grocery store. The girl who wouldn’t stop talking about her ex and who told me she was feeling sick and couldn’t stay out, but would I be interested in buying her chapbook of poetry?

I deleted all the numbers in the vein of Someone’s Mom or Someone Else’s Grandma. Those are from my days teaching elementary school, when I got so good at calling parents that it sometimes felt like that was my job, and not teaching the children. I called them with good news, I called them with bad news, I went to their houses on Sundays to try to ingratiate myself to them, because there was this sense that that was what it would take to be a good teacher. As I deleted, I thought about all the Someones and Someone Elses. Last week, my former co-worker sent me a picture of a girl we’d taught when she was in first grade. The girl was wearing a graduation gown with gold tassels, and my coworker wrote, “Guess who is valedictorian?” My breath stitched. Wait, I thought. Weren’t we just the other day buying cupcakes and playing on park slides with this little girl? And now she has Instagram-worthy lashes and a high school diploma? But how?

Some of the students whose numbers I still had saved in my phone have died. I went to their funerals years ago. Some of them had funerals I couldn’t attend, or wasn’t invited to, because they died years after I was their teacher. There were a lot of phone numbers in my phone that belonged to people who’ve died. My grandfather. My friend Jamie from college. An old boyfriend’s old roommate. Those numbers felt hard to delete, although logically, they should have been the easiest. But the contacts symbolized a time that I could remember, when those people had whole lives ahead of them. There was a line of communication. There was a button I could push, and on the other end would have been a possibility that no longer exists.

It took a while to delete those numbers; to accept that those stories have ended. A lot of my phone log editing felt like a kind of erasing of paths; acknowledgement of choices I have made, and doors that are closed. You put someone’s number in your phone in a moment when you think you might need it, and there’s a future that exists where you might use that number more than once; where it would be good to have it saved, so a relationship might grow bigger.

But there’s only so much time we have on earth, and I have spent a lot of my life not wanting to make choices. I have not wanted to believe in my own finiteness; that I actually can’t hold everything that I want to hold (or that I want to believe I can hold). But here’s the thing: making choices and then meeting sacrifice is what makes life meaningful. You can’t be everything for everyone; and this makes the people who you can be something for truly special. What would it be like to let go of all the things you aren’t? To rest for a while in the things that you are?

Of course, there were some people in my Contacts list to whom I hadn’t spoken in years and years, but whose numbers I didn’t want to delete. And so I had to confront what that meant: which is, some stories aren’t over, but have been left on “semicolon” for a while. I was liberal with the “Delete” button as I did my audit, because I made a rule: if I wanted to keep the number of someone who I hadn’t talked to in years, I had to text them today. I reached out to an old friend from New Orleans with whom I’d shared a lot of mezze platters at Mediterranean restaurants, an improv coach I’d admired, a boy from college who used to write poems for me. Others. Some people didn’t respond, which made me sad; but it also made me realize that maybe I was someone they needed to let go of, for their own hearts to be peaceful. Other people did respond, with long updates, photos, questions.

That felt good.

So I offer it up to you, as a task that might give you a gift. If you don’t have it in you to go on a total contact purge, find two people in your phone you haven’t talked to in a while, and reach out and say hi, and say thank you.

And delete a few names, too. Let them go. It might give you a sense of peace. It did for me. After all, that wasn’t the gynecologist I’d wanted.