Static Between Us
356 Words
For days, Drea tried to forget the message. She told herself it was spam, a
coincidence, an algorithmic echo.
But the words clung to her mind like static:
Do you still look?
She deleted the message, blocked the
account, and yet-every night, her phone
glowed.
A flicker.
A pulse.
Sometimes, it wasn't even from an app. Just the screen waking itself, as if to remind her it was still there.
The line between remembering and being
haunted had grown so thin, she couldn't
tell which side she was on anymore.
One night, she dreamt she was back in
Rome.
The café. The same chair. The table where
he'd once sat, sunlight glancing off the rim
of his glass.
Only this time, the chair wasn't empty.
He was there.
Head tilted, lips curled in that half-smirk.
But his eyes those were wrong. They
didn't belong to life anymore. They were
the gray of smoke, of something that used
to burn. When she woke, her phone lay beside her, screen glowing.
A new photo.
Her window. From outside.
Ghosts Don't Breathe
Drea didn't go to the police. What would
she even say? That a ghost had found her
Wi-Fi?
Instead, she checked the window -
nothing. Checked again - stll nothing.
The streets were empty, slick with rain,
silvered by streetlights.
She sat back on her couch and stared at
the phone, at the message below the
picture. "You left too sOon. Her throat tightened. The room pulsed. For
a moment, she swore she could hear
breathing that wasn't hers -a slow, quiet
rhythm that came and went with the wind.
She turned on the lights, every single one,
and poured a drink with shaking hands.
This wasn't him. Couldn't be him. He was
gone.
But grief was strange - it could wear any
mask, use any language.
She opened her laptop, went to his old
account. Still gone. But a tag caught her
eye under an old repost of one of his
pictures.
A new handle.
@MemoriaVeritas Her heart nearly stopped. When she clicked it, the page was empty.
No posts, no followers - except one.
Her.
- Writer
