The loneliness I felt in those first few weeks was like a famine inside of me. Every day a vicious, gnawing hunger ate away at my flesh and made me feel like a carcass the coyotes were picking clean. It got so bad I started to contemplate hurting myself. Driving off a cliff. Buying a gun. Pills. I knew I needed a friend, but the two friends I needed the most were the ones I didn’t have the courage to call. Then I remembered Sid was less than a day’s drive away. I rang him up, told him I was in a bad way, and asked him if I could stop in for a visit. He has a ten-acre spread not far from downtown Whitefish, right in the middle of a ponderosa pine forest.

“Come,” he said. “There’s an empty caretaker’s cabin on the property. It’s not fancy, but it’s yours if you want it.”

My intention was to stay a month or two, but winter hit northwestern Montana like an invading army, and I decided to wait it out. I got a job giving guitar lessons at a small music store in Kalispell and then supplemented that income by picking up construction work here and there. By summer I’d joined the writing workshop, and Sid’s house desperately needed a new roof, a project I gladly took on as a thank-you to him for putting me up. Before I knew it a year had passed; there had been no word from Cal or October, and Mill Valley got farther and farther from the end of my telescope.

Cal and October had managed to stay together for a couple of months after I left. Or maybe that was just how long it took the internet to find out about their breakup. I browsed the web regularly to check on them. When they officially called it quits, Cal moved back to Brooklyn. About a year later he started dating a woman that, according to an online celebrity gossip site, he met through mutual friends. Her name is Nicole and she makes documentaries on animals facing extinction.

I had a harder time gleaning information about October’s private life, but it was probably better that way. I had her work to keep me company, and I knew that was more intimate and telling than anything else the internet had to offer.

Once the entire catalog of 365 Selfies was available on the website, I went through phases where I visited it obsessively, watching different clips like they were episodes of my favorite TV show. Then I would swear it off like a drug habit I was trying to kick, vowing never to look at it again, avoiding it for days, sometimes weeks.

Those were the times I convinced myself I was over October. But then I would cave and start watching again. There was one particular clip that always set me back and made me wonder about things I knew it was unhealthy for me to wonder about. Number 361 of 365. One of the last selfies posted. In it, October is sitting on the same bed in the same cottage where we’d stayed in Miranda. Her eyes are wide and wild like they were the night we’d spent there, and it’s obvious to me that she’s eaten mushrooms again, though she doesn’t mention it. She has her big sketchbook on her lap, a pencil between her fingers, and she’s talking in a hyper-focused ramble as she draws.