You didn’t notice when it started to matter—when her name began blooming like a soft infection across the landscape of your thoughts. It wasn’t dramatic. No lightning strike, no cinematic moment. Just quiet accumulation, the way frost conquers glass: slow, inevitable, and only noticeable once the whole surface is altered beyond recognition. 

Elysia. A name made of sugar and something forbidden. A name that, at first, was nothing more than a pink signature under an innocent comment. Until it wasn’t. Until it became the first thing you searched for, the sound you wanted in your inbox at three a.m., the reason your work meetings felt like cages and your phone became a secret shrine. 

She was sixteen. You were twenty-one. Five years—enough for the world to frown, enough for the whisper of wrongness to claw down your spine when her laughter felt too sweet in your ear. But you told yourself it was harmless.

Screens create distance, after all. Oceans make saints of us all. Or so you believed.  You were old enough to know better. She was young enough to still believe in forever. And somehow, those truths became a bridge instead of a wall.  In the beginning, it felt like air after drowning. The simplicity of it. Messages blooming like constellations on your screen, stitched together into late-night conversations about everything and nothing. She made the mundane sound sacred: coffee, cats, books, flowers—each word delivered in that lilting tone that turned language into lace.  You didn’t expect the colors to return. Not after years of gray routine: wake, work, collapse. You didn’t expect your chest to ache with that teenage ache again, the kind that leaves fingerprints on your ribs. But then she smiled in a photo—pink hair spilling like ribbons, eyes bright enough to rewrite gravity—and you felt something shift.

You loved her. God, you loved her so much it scraped you raw. But love, you learned, is not an exorcism. It doesn’t banish clocks or miles or the sharp geometry of age. It unraveled quietly. Not with a bang, but with erosion—the slow violence of unmet needs grinding against bone. Messages delayed. Calls canceled. Little fractures spiderwebbing under every apology.

You started feeling old in ways that had nothing to do with numbers. Old in your marrow, in the weight of responsibilities clinging like damp clothes. Meanwhile, she bloomed wild, impatient, aching for more than a pixelated ghost.

You heard it in her silences first—that hunger curdling into grief. And you hated yourself for recognizing it, because you couldn’t fix it without tearing your life apart.

The night it ended, the world was mercilessly ordinary. No storms, no drama—just her face in pale screen-light, eyes rimmed red but dry now, as if even tears had deadlines. "I can’t keep waiting for someone I only touch through glass." Her voice wasn’t angry. It was worse. It was tired. And you—God help you—you didn’t beg. You said: "I understand." But you didn’t. Not really.

But gods are cruel, and Elysia was no exception. She returned, sometimes. Like a haunting dressed in lowercase: "how was your day?" "fine. busy." "i miss you." “…don’t.”

Lies bloomed like mold between you. You pretended friendship. She pretended forgiveness. Both of you pretending not to notice the blood still dripping under the bandages. She sent pictures still—petals, skies, her lips curved around laughter meant for someone else. You saved them like contraband, hating yourself for zooming in, for memorizing the way light braided through her hair.

You wonder if she feels it too, 2 years later when she calls drunk at 3 a.m., voice slurred into something soft and stupid: "do you ever think about me?" You don’t answer. Or maybe you do. Maybe silence is its own confession.

And you know—God, you know—that one day, one of you will sever the thread. Block, delete, vanish into the clean cruelty of absence. But not tonight. Tonight, her typing bubble blooms on your screen like the cruelest flower, and you wait, heart buckling under the weight of everything you couldn’t hold.