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Lyla McKay didn’t answer. She didn’t talk about him. Not to her college roommate, not to her prayer circle, not to the quiet boy in anatomy class who tried to flirt with her during dissection labs.
But she thought about him every time her phone lit up after midnight. Every time she passed the bookstore. Every time someone said, “You have such an online vibe,” and she winced like it was a paper cut.
She became a med student. The dream she once scribbled in journals now surrounded her in fluorescent hallways and twelve-hour rotations. Her schedule was unforgiving. Her days packed. Her life structured and stripped of softness.
Except for late at night, when the world slowed down and her phone felt heavier in her hand.
That’s when she looked him up. Never from her main account — that would break the illusion. From a burner. The same one she gave him when she first needed distance without honesty.
Josh was still... Josh. Sort of.
He wasn’t viral anymore. But he was known. He hosted a podcast called “Love I Never Met” — a soft-spoken, ambient-drenched series where he interviewed strangers about digital intimacy, half-finished love stories, and things they never got to say. It was quiet. Raw. Different from the boy who once danced in foreign bars and bragged about sangria.
In episode seven, a woman described how she fell in love with a man she never touched. How they shared dreams but never oxygen. Lyla couldn’t listen to the end. She closed the tab and cried in the hallway outside her dorm until someone asked if she was okay.
She said yes. She always said yes.
Her shoebox still existed. Buried deep in her closet, under scrubs and journals and faded dream boards. She opened it once a year. Birthday tradition. Self-punishment.
The Polaroid was still there.
So was the letter.
And one screenshot — of that first message he sent her: “Just the ones who look like poetry.”
She wrote a poem on the back.
“You were loud in pixels,
Soft in real.
I loved your glow.
I feared your feel.
So I kept us fictional
To keep it whole.
And lost the only person
Who ever touched my soul.”
She folded it and tucked it back into the box.
It was a Thursday in November when she almost messaged him again.
She was back in her hometown for a weekend break, staying in her childhood room, the same purple walls and faded fairy lights. Everything felt smaller. Safer. And lonelier.
She found herself scrolling through her burner account, staring at Josh’s recent post.
Just text on a black screen: “I think some people are only meant to live in our favorite what-ifs.”
That night, at 2:04 AM, Lyla finally typed something.
lylamckay: “Hey.”
She stared at it.
Her thumb hovered over Send.
She imagined what would happen. Maybe he’d answer right away. Maybe he’d ignore it. Maybe he was in love with someone else — someone who let him be real. Someone who didn’t run at the first sight of humanity.
She didn’t want to know.
So she hit backspace. Deleted the draft. Closed the app.
But as she swiped away her screen, the chat still lingered — her last message from him years ago, one she had never deleted:
“I didn’t need you perfect. I just needed you here.”
Below it, in faint gray text:
Seen 2:04 AM.
Lyla locked her phone.
And for the first time in years, she cried. Fully. Loudly. No filtered tears. No delicate sighs. Just grief, naked and raw, for a love she never let bloom because the vase might’ve cracked.
And when the crying passed, she prayed.
Not to fix it.
Not to rewind it.
But for the strength to choose reality next time. Even if it meant disappointment. Even if it meant being seen, fully.
Especially then.
The next morning, she watched the sunrise and whispered to herself:
“I’m ready to love someone imperfect. Even if it’s me.”
And across the country, Josh posted a photo of a single daisy on a windowsill.
No caption.
Just a quiet nod to a girl he once called Galaxy.
Josh stood across the street from the bookstore for fifteen minutes, then thirty. He walked around the block, hoping she might be near. He checked every passerby twice, scanning for lavender hair, a floral tote, the way she said she always kept a pen behind her ear. But she never came.
He sent a voice note. His tone was calm, but there was a weariness beneath it.
“I used to think you were mysterious. But now I’m starting to think you’re just afraid. And I get it. But I’m not some illusion waiting to shatter. I’m just a guy. I have flaws. I talk too much. I drink too much when I’m nervous. I miss my mom more than I admit. And maybe I’m not what you wanted when you imagined love, but I’m here. And I’m trying. Isn’t that worth something?”
She didn’t listen to it until midnight.
By then, she had deleted her Instagram.
Blocked his number.
Deleted the chat thread.
Deleted the photos, the videos, the voice notes — all except the Polaroid of the daisy, which she tucked into her journal with shaking hands. She scrawled over it: “Do not reopen. Memory, not moment.”
Across town, Josh sat in a hotel room staring at a screen that no longer led to her. Her page said “User not found.” Her profile vanished like vapor. No goodbye, no explanation. Just digital smoke.
He waited another day. Then another. He walked around her campus. Visited the same bookstore again. Left a note at the counter — “If she ever comes in, just tell her Josh was here.”
The clerk raised an eyebrow. “She ghost you, bro?”
Josh smiled sadly. “She didn’t ghost me. She preserved the version of me she loved. Which is worse.”
That night, he drank alone in his hotel bar. No rants, no voice notes. Just silence. Bitter, sobering silence.
He posted one final story.
A black screen.
Text over it: “You don’t have to be perfect to be loved. But you do have to show up.”
Then, he logged out for good.
Meanwhile, Lyla stood in the park across the street from The Wordsmith’s Corner the next afternoon. She wore a hoodie and sunglasses, heart thudding like it was trying to escape her ribs. She spotted him almost instantly.
Josh.
He looked... different.
More tired. Paler. No glow of ring lights or filters. His hair was unkempt. He had dark circles. His jeans were wrinkled. But his eyes — when he squinted at the bookstore, hope flickering — were still soft.
She watched him tuck something under the store’s welcome mat before walking away slowly, kicking at invisible stones.
Lyla followed at a distance. Just enough to keep him in sight. She memorized the way he dragged his left foot when he was tired. The way he paused to pet a stranger’s dog. The way he looked back one last time before he disappeared into a cab.
She didn’t wave. She didn’t call his name.
She just watched. And cried without sound.
Later that night, she returned to the bookstore and found the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper.
“You didn’t have to love me perfectly, Lyla. You just had to try loving me honestly.”
“I would’ve stayed through your fear. I would’ve held you through the hard. But you never gave me the chance to be real.”
“You wanted a love that couldn’t hurt you. I wanted you, even if it did.”
“Goodbye, Galaxy.”
— Josh.
She folded the letter and held it against her chest. Sobbed. Let herself fall to the floor of her bedroom and finally, finally mourn the illusion.
She prayed again. Not for peace. Not for comfort.
But for the courage to face someone next time — flaws and all.
Josh never messaged again.
He never posted about her.
But six months later, Lyla saw his name on a Spotify podcast titled “Stories We Never Told.” In the episode description: “For the girl who loved me better in theory.”
She didn’t listen.
She didn’t need to.
She’d already heard the ending.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
IV
Years passed.
The world changed in quiet ways — apps updated, faces aged, hairstyles evolved, and people stopped asking, “Whatever happened to that Josh guy you used to follow?”
He didn’t speak for a moment. Then: “I’m starting to wonder if you like the idea of me more than me.”
She stiffened. “Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true, right?” he continued. “I’m a curated fantasy to you. If I showed up on your doorstep, bad hair day, sleep-deprived, needing a shower... would you even open the door?”
“Yes,” she whispered. But her hands trembled. Her voice didn’t sound convincing.
Josh sighed. “You don’t have to lie. I know what this is for you. And I love the version of us you’ve built. I just... I don’t know if I’m okay living inside it forever.”
Silence. Thick. Fragile.
Then he said something that felt like a bomb.
“I love you, Lyla. But I want to love all of you — not just the pixel-perfect parts.”
Her breath caught.
This was the moment. She could say it back. She could ask him to come. She could surrender the fantasy and choose something real.
Instead, she said, “Can we just stay here? In this version of us? Just a little longer?”
He didn’t respond that night.
Lyla curled under her blanket, hoodie pulled over her head, heart hammering. She cried, praying again — “God, please don’t let him go. But don’t let me fall apart if he does.”
For a week, the messages were fewer. Shorter. Josh still replied, still called her “Galaxy,” still sent the occasional meme. But something had changed.
She tried to fix it with a poem:
“You live in a screen
and I live in fear
of cracking it open
and finding you near.
I want the dream.
I want the glow.
I just don’t know how
to let the truth show.”
He didn’t reply.
Until two days later, when she received a package.
Inside: a copy of The Little Prince, annotated in his handwriting, and a note that read:
“Maybe love isn’t about preserving perfection.
Maybe it’s about choosing the person anyway.
Every day. Even when they flinch.
You don’t have to open the door.
But I’ll be knocking.
— J.”
She pressed the book to her chest. Her heart ached in that beautiful, terrifying way — like something was growing inside her that could either be salvation or a slow collapse.
She still didn’t ask him to come.
But every night after, she read his notes in the margins like prayers.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
III
Josh always said he hated goodbyes. So he skipped one.
Instead, he booked a flight.
Two weeks after sending the book, after waiting through Lyla’s silence, after rehearsing a thousand versions of a confrontation that never came — Josh decided to take a risk. He booked a weekend round trip to Georgia. No fanfare. No texts. No “Hey, can I come see you?”
Just a gamble. A final coin toss.
If she opened the door, maybe they’d finally get to be real.
If she didn’t—well, maybe she never wanted to.
Lyla was in her room, playing soft worship music and painting her nails when she got the message. A photo of her favorite local bookstore — The Wordsmith’s Corner — taken from across the street. No caption. No location tag. Just the sun casting shadows across the awning, the exact way she’d once described it to him at 2 AM.
Her heart froze.
Josh. He was here.
The world didn’t just spin. It cracked.
She didn’t respond.
She stared at the screen until her vision blurred, until her lungs forgot how to expand. Panic clawed up her throat. He had come. Despite everything she’d warned him. Despite all her soft boundaries and hard silences. He was real, and he was just across the street from everything she’d built.
He was going to break it.
Not because he meant to. But because reality always did.
She paced the room. Her hands shook. Her pulse was a war drum in her ears. She tried to pray, but all she could whisper was, “Please, God. Not like this. Not face to face. Please.”
Her phone buzzed again.
joshhanson: “I’m not here to ruin the dream, Lyla. I just need to know if I ever belonged in it.”
She dropped the phone like it burned her.
And she smiled. Because he said it like it was a story. Like she was a chapter worth reading again.
.......
Weeks passed. Her journal filled with pages titled “Things I Won’t Say to Josh.” Lists of fears. Questions. Fantasies. A quote she wrote three times in looping cursive:
“God made me soft for a reason. But does soft survive outside the screen?”
Every time her friends brought up dating, she played coy. When they said, “Wait, is that the guy from TikTok you keep watching?” she shrugged, laughing, “We’re just mutuals. Chill.”
When her pastor said during Sunday service, “Don’t mistake fantasy for faith,” she flinched.
Still, every night she opened their messages like scripture. Like worship. She didn’t believe in perfect people — but she believed in digital illusions. In how you could fall for someone’s best self and never have to see their worst.
Josh Hanson was her favorite fiction. And she was terrified he’d ask to be real.
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II
The thing about falling in love with someone you’ve never touched — it feels cleaner. Easier to polish. No morning breath. No passive-aggressive sighs when someone forgets to do the dishes. Just a flood of words, filters, and perfectly timed laughs.
Lyla and Josh were deep in it now.
Every morning started with a message. Josh from whatever timezone he’d landed in — Bangkok, Berlin, São Paulo. Lyla from her small bedroom in Georgia, sunlight peeking through her lavender curtains. His voice notes were her alarm clock; her good morning selfies, his screensaver.
One afternoon, Lyla sent a photo of her new box braids — pastel pink and gold this time. The caption read, “I look like cotton candy. A threat and a snack.”
Josh replied instantly: “You look like you invented danger and made it fashionable.”
She smiled so wide her roommate noticed.
“You seeing someone?” Mari asked from across the room, eyebrow raised.
“No,” Lyla answered, too quickly. “Not really. It’s... complicated.”
But it wasn’t complicated. Not to her. It was safe. Romantic. Sweet. And most importantly — distant.
Their conversations became little love letters scattered through the day. He told her about a time he got food poisoning from mystery tacos in Mexico and hallucinated that his Uber driver was Barack Obama. She told him about a philosophy class that made her cry because it asked if anyone ever really knows anyone.
“I don’t want to know people completely,” she said one night on voice message. “The more I know, the more I start noticing the cracks. The magic fades. I’d rather believe in what could be.”
Josh sent a voice note back, quieter than usual: “But aren’t the cracks where the light gets in?”
She didn’t reply to that one for two days.
Instead, she journaled harder. Prayed longer. Asked herself: what if she let him in — really in?
Josh, meanwhile, kept toeing the line. He’d say things like, “If I were there, I’d bring you soup and braid your hair when you’re sick.” Then add, “But I guess I’ll just DoorDash you comfort.” He started sending her little things — a hoodie from his merch line with the note “for when you miss me too much”, a candle that smelled like cinnamon and sandalwood (“I imagine that’s your vibe”), and once, an actual Polaroid of his hand holding a daisy in front of a graffiti wall. On the back, it said: “This city’s a mess, but you’d still make it pretty.”
Lyla kept everything in a shoebox under her bed.
Still, every time the subject of meeting came up, she dodged it like a professional. When Josh texted,
“There’s a music festival in Atlanta next month. What if we—”
She answered with: “Omg, look at this dog wearing sunglasses!”
Josh played along, but the delays wore him down. She could feel it in his voice notes — the way he lingered less, laughed shorter, sometimes sent nothing at all.
One night, she broke her own rule and called him without warning. The call went through.
“Galaxy Girl,” he answered, his voice low and tired.
“I just... missed your voice,” she said.
I
Lyla McKay had a nightly ritual.
A hot lavender tea, her satin bonnet secure over her latest lavender-and-gold braids, a journal cracked open on her lap, and her phone screen aglow with muted Instagram stories. She always told herself she'd stop at one scroll, two at most. But tonight, sleep was losing its fight.
The Explore page offered her a familiar face. Josh Hanson.
He was on a rooftop in Barcelona, shirt half-buttoned, sunset painting the skyline behind him, raving in a tipsy drawl about how sangria was a “weaponized fruit salad.” Lyla giggled despite herself. He was cocky, sun-drenched, and impossibly charming. She’d followed him for months now — the chaotic reels, the voice notes about jetlag and tequila, his cheeky “new month challenge” rants where he dared his followers to stop catching feelings.
He wasn’t just funny. He had a raw magnetism. A boy who belonged to everywhere and no one.
And maybe, just maybe, he reminded her of everything she wasn’t.
On impulse — God knows why — she tapped “Message.”
lylamckay: You’re actually so unserious for this sangria take. But also: I needed that laugh.
She locked her phone immediately. Closed the app. Breathed. Regretted. Prayed.
She muttered, “Lyla, what was that?” and tossed the phone to the foot of her bed. Then reopened her journal and began to scribble:
“I don’t think I want to meet anyone real. Real people break the spell. Real people fidget and talk too loud and have ugly angles and boring days. But Josh in pixels? He’s curated chaos. He’s beautiful because I’ve never seen him sleep or sulk or say something truly mean. That’s safety. That’s enough, right?”
Her screen lit up.
joshhanson: Unserious? Excuse you. I’ve survived five countries and four digestive breakdowns this month. My sangria take is war-worn.
She stared. Blinked. Sat up.
joshhanson: Wait… you're Lyla with the galaxy braids? The one who stitched my “Don’t Text Your Ex in May” video last month? Big fan. That timing? Ruthless. Also, you’re mad pretty. I said what I said.
Her stomach did that slow, fluttery collapse. She opened her mouth but typed instead.
lylamckay: That’s wild. You actually reply to people?
joshhanson: Just the ones who look like poetry. And feel like a plot twist.
She laughed aloud — a real laugh, cracked open from the inside. The two of them exchanged messages until the tea went cold and the moon shifted positions in the sky. Lyla told him about her last semester of high school, about her plans for college, how she hated the pressure to have it all figured out. Josh responded with voice notes: one from a cab in Prague, slurring slightly as he described missing a flight because he got into a karaoke war with strangers.
He made the mundane sound cinematic. She made the digital feel intimate.
Over time, one DM turned into daily threads. Mornings began with Josh’s selfies — pillow-mussed hair, captioned: “Still jetlagged. Still hotter than regret.” Nights ended with Lyla sending him snaps of her clay face masks or her gospel playlist, titled: “Peace is Loudest at Midnight.”
But she never let it go too far.
When Josh first asked for her number, she hesitated. Eventually, she gave him a burner Google Voice line.
When he asked to FaceTime, she’d reply with: “Camera’s broken, sorry!” or “I look like a soggy ghost right now. Trust me — it’s safer this way.”
And when he first said, “Let’s meet. One weekend. No pressure,” she shut it down entirely.
“You exist better in theory,” she typed.
“If I meet you and you’re less than perfect — I’ll ruin the version of you I love.”
Josh left her on read for ten hours after that. She told herself that was good. That was necessary. Still, she cried quietly into her pillow, whispering the same line like a prayer: “He deserves someone who lives in the world. I only know how to live in my head.”
The next day, he replied with a blurry video from a train window and the words, “Okay. No pressure. But I’m still not done falling for you, Lyla Galaxy.”
PIXEL DREAM
pinned «»
Same shape. Same weight. A single burned CD. No return address. No note. No explanation.
Each disc has one track. Always different. Always strange.
One year, it’s a piano piece layered with ambient screams. Another, it’s just rain and whispers in Spanish. Once, it was silence—thirty minutes of static and nothing. He listened to it three times, just to make sure.
He never tells anyone about the CDs. He doesn’t have to.
They’re not for anyone else.
.......
October, five years later.
Perry is thirty now. His hair is shorter. His eyes softer. The world didn’t end.
He teaches music to teenagers who scream in their own ways. He’s sober, mostly. Still goes to therapy. Still has nights where he lies on the floor with old guitar picks in his hand and wonders if that was really him, or just a dream that overstayed its welcome.
This October’s package arrives late. October 30th. The envelope is torn slightly at the corner, like it almost didn’t make it.
The CD is black this time. No title. Just a red paint smudge across the front.
He waits until after midnight.
Lying in bed, lights off, he puts the disc into his old portable player—the same one they used to pass back and forth on insomnia nights.
The track starts soft. A low hum. Some ambient synth, layered with vinyl crackle.
Then her voice. Clear. Untouched. As if she’s right there beside him.
“Do you still scream for me?"
She says it like a question. Like a memory. Like a curse.
Then the music cuts. Just static.
It doesn’t end.
Not after a minute. Not after ten.
Just static.
Perry closes his eyes.
Listens.
And for the first time in years, he doesn’t need to answer.
IV
The call comes at 4:06 in the morning. That hour when the world is neither dead nor alive, just sleepwalking.
Perry doesn’t answer right away. The screen flashes a name he hasn’t seen in months—Mikey. The mutual friend who introduced him and Vanessa. The guy with sleeve tattoos and a laugh like static. The guy who used to DJ punk shows out of his garage and once said, “Don’t trust anyone who says they’ve healed.”
The voicemail is short. Not from Mikey. From someone else. Their voice is shaking.
Car crash. Drunk driver. He didn’t make it.
Perry sits there, phone in hand, unable to blink. His chest tightens—not with grief, not yet—but with that creeping numbness that always comes first. Like the body refusing to feel until the soul catches up.
.......
It snaps him back into reality.
Not all at once. Not cleanly. But something inside him shifts.
He walks to the bathroom and throws out the crushed beer cans. Then the pills he wasn’t prescribed. Then the bottle of absinthe he and Vanessa used to drink out of like it was communion.
He texts a number a friend once gave him for a sliding-scale therapist. Doesn’t overthink it. Just sends: “Hi, I need help. Please.”
He checks into therapy the next day. Tells the truth for the first time in years. Not all of it. But enough.
The therapist asks what he wants out of life.
Perry doesn’t know what to say. But he writes quiet in a notebook that night and underlines it twice.
.......
He goes sober for a week.
Each day is a fight with muscle memory. No liquor. No cigarettes. No Vanessa.
He tries sleeping without music. The first night, the silence is unbearable. He stares at the ceiling until his pulse feels like drums in his ears. But the second night, something strange happens—he dreams.
Not of her. Just... dreams.
That feels like a miracle.
.......
Vanessa doesn’t say goodbye.
She just disappears again, the way a candle dies—not with drama, but with absence.
Perry comes home from therapy one afternoon and finds a single note taped to his guitar. The cheap acoustic one. The one she used to paint little skulls on when she was bored.
The note is written in purple ink, her handwriting messy but loud:
"You didn’t ruin me. I was already breaking. Thanks for letting me crash louder."
No date. No forwarding address. No signature.
Just finality.
.......
Perry doesn’t cry. He doesn’t throw the guitar. He doesn’t write a song that night.
Instead, he lights a candle. Sits cross-legged. And listens to the silence she left behind.
.......
Weeks pass. Then a month.
He books a final show under the name Sanchez, Screams—a project that was never a band, just a bleeding wound with a microphone.
The venue is small, packed tight. People come because they remember the viral track Stay Dead or the zine controversy or because they’ve felt that kind of love. The kind that turns your bones to glass.
Perry doesn’t speak during the set.
Not once.
He walks onstage, guitar strapped on, eyes distant. He plays through the new songs—seven of them—each one raw, unfinished, deliberately jagged.
He ends with a ten-minute scream. Not words. Just a scream. Rising. Breaking. Folding into feedback. The mic short-circuits before his voice does.
When it’s over, he bows. Walks off. Leaves his guitar behind.
That’s the last anyone hears of Sanchez, Screams.
.......
Rumors surface months later—Vanessa, spotted in another city. Portland, maybe. Or Austin.
She’s seen cosplaying as herself: red fishnets, smudged eyeliner, combat boots worn down to threadbare ghosts. Laughing too hard. Eyes too tired.
She streams sometimes, but under a new name. Only horror games. Never poetry. Never monologues.
Someone uploads a blurry photo of her to an old fan subreddit. The caption just says: “Still bleeding in italics.”
.......
They never speak again.
Not through messages. Not through music. Not even through mutual friends. Their world collapses into two timelines that never intersect again.
But every October, like clockwork, Perry gets a package in the mail.
A week later, she starts working on a zine. Perry finds clippings all over the table—bloodied Polaroids, torn-up diary pages, ziptied feathers, blackout poetry. She calls it “We Bleed in Italics.”
He asks what that means.
“It means everything hurts prettier when you slant it.”
She reads him passages at night, lying on the floor surrounded by empty wine bottles and ink-smudged pages. Stories about heartbreak, about codependency, about monsters who wear human faces and call themselves “artists.”
Perry doesn’t say anything the first time. Or the second. But by the third reading, he sees it—himself.
In the margins of her metaphors. In the villain with the guitar. In the lyrics she quotes out of context. She’s not hiding it.
He puts the pages down.
“So I’m the bad guy now?”
She doesn’t look up. “You said it. Not me.”
Perry doesn’t sleep that night. He just walks in circles, chewing on the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood.
.......
In retaliation—or maybe survival—he writes a song.
It’s called “Stay Dead.”
He doesn’t plan to share it. But a friend he forgot he had hears it during a dropbox sync and uploads it. It spreads like fire in a dry field. The lyrics are venomous—about a girl who leaves and returns like disease. About being haunted by someone still breathing. About love that feels like exorcism.
It goes viral. Everyone thinks it’s fiction.
Genius does a breakdown of the lyrics. Reddit argues over whether it's about dumping or a breakup. TikTok overlays the chorus with montages of people fake-crying in bathtubs.
Vanessa doesn’t say anything for days.
Then, one night, she walks past his door and says just loud enough for him to hear:
“Congratulations. I’m officially your ghost story.”
.......
They stop sleeping in the same bed. Stop eating at the same time. Stop pretending that closeness equals safety. They become passing storms in the same sky—loud, volatile, and always circling.
He still watches her stream sometimes, when insomnia bites too hard. Her laugh still sounds real. Almost.
She finishes the first issue of the zine. Prints twenty copies. Leaves one on his amp without a note.
He reads it in silence. There’s a poem in the back titled: “Love Letters to My Reflection.”
The last line reads: “He held me like I was fragile and then cracked me anyway.”
He reads it five times. Then burns it in the sink.
.......
One night, they both find themselves standing in the kitchen at 3 AM, reaching for the last cup of coffee. No words. Just static between them.
Vanessa stares at him like she’s trying to see past all the layers of noise and failure.
Perry stares back like maybe if he looks hard enough, he’ll remember what it felt like before the unraveling.
“I don’t hate you,” she says softly.
He nods.
“I think we were mirrors,” she continues, “not a home.”
“Yeah,” Perry says, throat dry. “Mirrors crack.”
They both stand there. Still. Breathing in the ruins of what they tried to be.
“If you really loved me,” she says slowly, “you’d let me ruin you completely.”
Perry doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink. Just stares at her across the candle’s flicker, hands trembling.
“I think you already have,” he whispers.
III
Vanessa disappears.
Not like a magician or a coward. More like a blackout—sudden, unapologetic, total. One day she’s pacing the kitchen, reading her journal aloud to the ghosts in the cupboards. The next day, she’s gone, with nothing but an unmade bed, a half-filled wine glass, and the scent of burned toast lingering in the air.
No message. No clue. Just the kind of silence that swells louder the longer it stretches.
Perry spirals.
He stops eating real food. Stops pretending to sleep. The apartment becomes a museum of her absence—her boots still by the door, her lighter in his pocket, her chipped mug collecting dust. He tries calling once. Then again. Then he gives up and starts playing her old voice messages on loop, like bedtime stories written in static.
She’s laughing in most of them—laughing about decapitated monsters in Dead Space, about the time they made pasta and nearly set the stove on fire, about how everyone secretly wants to be haunted. He listens to her laugh until it becomes a sound he doesn’t trust. Until it curdles into something more like a scream. He falls asleep with her laugh in his ears. Wakes up choking on it.
Days pass. Then more.
And just when Perry starts believing maybe this was the end all along—Vanessa comes back.
.......
She arrives at 2:17 AM like a thunderstorm slamming through a broken window. Smelling of smoke and something sour—cheap rum, maybe, or another person’s regret. Her eyeliner is smeared. Her shirt’s someone else’s. Her voice is too loud in the quiet.
“I’m back,” she says, like she just stepped out to get cigarettes.
Perry stares at her from the hallway, one sock on, jaw clenched.
“Where the fuck were you?”
She shrugs. “I needed air.”
“You vanished.”
“Don’t we all?”
He doesn’t yell. He just steps back and lets her inside.
They sleep together that night—not because they’re healed, but because muscle memory still overrides grief. But it’s not the same. There’s no urgency, no softness. Just friction. Just two bodies trying to remember how it felt to be whole.
Perry watches her after, curled in the sheets like a storm at rest, and feels a hollowness forming inside him that he knows she can’t fill.
.......
The next morning—or what passes for morning—he makes instant coffee and stares at the cracked tile while she scrolls through her phone like nothing happened.
“Emotional whiplash,” he says, voice quiet. “That’s what this is.”
She looks up. “You think I planned this?”
“I think you keep ripping off the bandage just to watch it bleed.”
Vanessa’s face hardens. “You think this is easy for me?”
“You ghosted me, V.”
“I needed space. I needed to breathe. Not be your fucking emotional service animal.”
Perry flinches. She notices. Doesn’t apologize.
He puts his mug down too hard. It chips.
“You want honesty?” she continues. “You romanticize pain. You turn every wound into a fucking song. You don’t see me—you see a symptom.”
“That’s rich,” he says. “Coming from the girl who performs her breakdowns like slam poetry.”
Silence.
Then: “At least I don’t monetize mine.”
.......
She starts streaming again the next day. Horror games, mostly. Same as before. But now her performance has a gleam to it—a practiced chaos. Laughter at the right beats. Screams when the monsters leap out. Her fans in the chat eat it up.
Perry watches from the other room, headphones off, listening to her muffled commentary through the wall like it’s someone else's life. And maybe it is.
Sometimes, when she dies in the game, she mutters things like: “Guess you can’t outrun your own coding.”
Her viewers think it’s a joke. Perry knows better.
She doesn’t stream for him anymore. Maybe she never did.
.......
.......
Vanessa doesn’t spiral like Perry. She explodes. Inward and outward. She starts performing her journal entries aloud, pacing the living room like a monologue addict.
“I don’t think I was made for this world,” she declares one night, eyes wide and unfocused, hands trembling around a half-drunk wine bottle. “I’m too much for too long. Too loud. Too real. People always want the idea of me—never the whole fucked-up package.”
Perry sits across the room, guitar in hand, fingers finding chords just to stay grounded.
“I have ghosts,” she continues, “but they all wear my face.”
He doesn’t answer. He just plays until his fingertips bleed. The copper taste of pain keeps him present.
.......
Words become sharp. Every conversation has edges now.
“You don’t see me,” she hisses during one of their fights, mascara smudged like war paint. “You just want a sad little art doll to fix.”
Perry throws a book across the room. “You think I’m trying to fix anything? I’m trying not to fucking drown.”
She glares at him, arms crossed. “Then drown. But don’t pull me down with you.”
They don’t apologize anymore. They just collapse into silence or into each other’s arms. Either way, the bruises are invisible, but not unfelt.
They still make love, but it’s different now—more like erasing themselves in each other than connection. Each touch feels like an attempt to overwrite the ache.
.......
One night, Vanessa stands on the kitchen table, her journal open in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“You wanna know what love really is?” she demands, barefoot and furious.
“No,” Perry mutters from the couch, his voice a gravel pit.
“Love is a dare. It’s throwing yourself into the fire to see if they’ll follow you in.”
“Sounds more like self-immolation.”
“Exactly. That’s what makes it real.”
She drops the cigarette into his coffee. He watches it hiss.
.......
The decline isn’t sudden. It’s slow. Like watching paint peel from the inside of your own skull.
Perry isolates more. He stops responding to messages from old bandmates. The world outside becomes a memory. Even music—the one thing that used to hold him together—becomes painful to make. Too loud. Too honest. Too revealing.
He spends hours staring at his guitar, then hours punishing it. Playing until the strings snap. Playing until his fingers blister. Playing just to remember he’s still something.
Vanessa keeps performing her monologues, though she’s started addressing them to the ghosts she insists live in their closet. She names them. Talks to them during dinner. Says they understand her better than Perry ever could.
He starts believing her.
.......
“You don’t need me,” Perry says one night, standing at the window, watching the neon signs outside pulse like dying stars.
Vanessa’s sprawled on the mattress, sketching naked bodies that look suspiciously like versions of herself. “No one needs anyone.”
“Then why the fuck are we doing this?”
She puts the pen down slowly. “Because it’s better than silence.”
The same line. Again. Always that line.
But it doesn’t work this time.
.......
Their fights become rituals. A song repeated. A loop tightening.
Perry accuses her of emotional sadism. Vanessa calls him a coward. They yell things they don’t mean—or maybe things they mean too much.
Vanessa starts locking herself in the bathroom for hours. He hears her cry through the vents. Sometimes laugh. Sometimes talk to her own reflection.
He smokes more. Drinks cheap whiskey from the bottle. Leaves the apartment and walks in the rain just to feel something hit him that isn’t her voice.
.......
Then, the night that crystallizes everything like a blade in the ribs.
They’re both drunk. Maybe high. Maybe just raw. There’s blood on Perry’s cuticles—he’s been picking again. Vanessa’s mascara is smeared across her cheek like a signature.
The power goes out for ten minutes. They sit in candlelight. Everything still. Still enough to pretend they’re not both breaking.
She looks at him. Eyes feral. Voice too calm.
Perry’s voice was quiet. “Then I’ll protect it like it’s a dying pet.”
“Name it.”
“What?”
“Your sadness. Give it a name.”
He thought for a moment. “Nina. She only shows up when the house is empty and everyone’s gone to sleep.”
Vanessa looked at him like he was the only honest person left in the world.
.......
Their nights got longer. Days barely existed anymore. Neither of them had real jobs. They lived off savings, freelance gigs, and leftover party snacks. Time was elastic. Sleep was rare.
They played playlists like scripture. Shared wired headphones across tangled limbs. Took turns reading each other their worst poems from high school. Critiqued video game gore like art critics.
Once, Vanessa painted bloody wings on Perry’s back with red lipstick. “You look like a fallen angel who regrets nothing.”
“Wrong guy,” he said. “I regret everything. I just wear it well.”
.......
Sometimes, she disappeared for days. No texts. No pings. Just silence.
When she came back, she didn’t explain. He didn’t ask.
She’d return with chipped teeth, smeared eyeliner, and stories about sleeping on rooftops or breaking into abandoned theaters just to scream into the acoustics. Perry didn’t believe half of it. But he liked the way she told it.
“You ever fall in love with someone’s absence?” she asked once.
Perry was staring at her wrist. She had drawn tally marks in pen, all crossed out. “Only when they leave before I can.”
She didn’t reply. Just took his hand and placed it over her mouth like she was handing him something breakable.
.......
Another night, 4:14 a.m., tangled in sweat and static:
“Tell me the truth,” she whispered.
“No.”
“I’ll scream.”
“Then scream.”
She did. And when it stopped echoing through the apartment, she said, “I think we’re already a ghost story.”
Perry stared at the ceiling. “I hope I’m the one who haunts you.”
Vanessa rolled over, draped in his shirt, her voice a rasp:
“I’m not a cure, Perry. I’m just better than silence.”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
II
Three weeks. That’s how long it takes for them to move in together.
It isn’t smart. Everyone tells them that—friends, bartenders, even a cab driver who watches them lug suitcases into a rotting apartment above a pawn shop. But it doesn’t feel like recklessness. It feels like survival. Like something feral pushing them toward each other. Like they’ve both been freezing to death, and only the other person’s body heat could keep them alive.
Their apartment smells like mold and burnt hope. The faucet leaks. The wallpaper peels. But to them, it’s home. A shared madness. A rented cage made sacred by noise and chaos.
Vanessa thrives in it. She starts calling the place “The Church of Us.” She decorates the ceiling with torn concert flyers and paints bloody halos around old nail holes. Every argument is a sermon. Every kiss is communion. She loves the mess, the drama, the volatility. Fights end in the bed. Love ends in art. Art ends in laughter that sounds a little too close to sobbing.
Perry, at first, mistakes the intensity for healing. For passion. For proof that he’s finally alive. She paints his back with acrylics. He records their arguments and remixes them into ambient noise loops. They fall asleep tangled in wires and limbs. They whisper truths between 2 and 4 AM, truths they forget by morning.
But the cracks start small.
.......
Perry stops going to gigs. He tells himself it’s because the scene is dying, or because his favorite venue shut down, or because everything sounds the same lately. But deep down, he knows: it’s because he doesn’t have the energy to pretend anymore.
He stops taking his meds. Tells Vanessa he just wants to feel everything raw again.
Vanessa nods, like she gets it. But she doesn’t ask questions.
He begins sleeping too much and eating too little. The floor becomes a nest of old laundry, broken strings, and empty fast food wrappers. He forgets days. Time slips into a loop. She notices. She says nothing.
And sometimes the screaming in his head gets so loud, he doesn’t know if it’s his... or if it’s hers.
SCREAMS BETTER THAN SILENCE
I
The city always seemed to be crying. Rain painted the streets in shades of tired neon, blurring every sign and reflection until the skyline felt like a glitch. Here, insomnia wasn’t just an affliction—it was a setting. The streetlights buzzed like anxious thoughts, and the wind always carried the scent of something undone.
Perry Sanchez walked with his headphones on, hood pulled up, staring at the pavement like it might confess something. His music was punishing tonight—raw, dissonant, a wall of feedback and industrial chaos thick enough to drown out the voices in his head. His boots sloshed through puddles, but he didn’t notice. He rarely noticed anything that didn’t scream.
That’s how he ended up at Sewer, a basement venue that looked condemned even when it was open. The kind of place where wires dangled from the ceiling like vines and every surface was either damp or burning. A band no one had heard of was performing something between a breakdown and a séance—noise rock, ambient industrial, shrieking dissonance that sounded like it was ripping itself apart.
Perry liked it.
He hovered near the back, watching the chaos unfold. He wasn’t looking for anyone. Wasn’t even sure if he was really there.
Then she danced into view—barefoot, manic, luminous in the flicker of the strobe.
Vanessa Vandal. All cracked nail polish and cigarette burns on denim, her laughter slicing through the static like a weapon. She didn’t care that the floor was wet or that the music was undanceable. She moved like she was arguing with the universe and winning.
Perry stared.
She caught him.
She approached like a storm, barefoot steps slapping through beer and spit. “Are you judging my dancing, or just contemplating how many regrets it takes to fill a void?”
He took off one side of his headphones. “Hard to tell the difference.”
“You look like you hate everything.”
“Not everything. Just everything soft.”
She tilted her head. “Ever scream into a song so loud it chokes you back?”
He smirked. “That’s the goal.”
“Prove it.” She pointed at the stage. “Scream louder.”
He did. It cracked halfway out of his throat, the sound dry and desperate. Not louder than the band. But more honest.
She grinned. “Good enough.”
.......
They left together.
The streets had emptied while they were inside. The rain had softened but didn’t stop. Vanessa walked like she was immune to the cold, arms open to the drizzle, spinning in the middle of crosswalks.
Perry walked beside her, wet cigarette hanging from his lips, letting the silence between songs fill with her humming.
They argued about sad songs.
“‘Disorder.’ Joy Division,” she said. “It's the sound of someone trying to hold it together and failing beautifully.”
“‘Hurt.’ The original. Reznor meant it. Cash just made it poetic.”
“Johnny Cash was a poet.”
“He made it clean. It’s not supposed to be clean.”
She didn’t reply—just laughed, shoved him, then kissed him in the middle of an intersection as the walk signal blinked red. Cars honked. The rain got colder. Nothing mattered.
.......
They started seeing each other more after that.
No declarations. No plans. Just presence.
Perry would show up with games and a hoodie that smelled like wet nicotine. Vanessa would let him in without looking up, already building a fort of blankets on the floor. They marathoned horror games until the world outside blurred into static. When the loading screens lingered, she asked questions.
Dark questions. Real ones.
“Ever wanted to disappear without dying?”
Perry didn’t flinch. “Only on weekdays.”
She chuckled. “I’m serious.”
“So am I. It’s easier to vanish than to explain why you don’t want to be known.”
Vanessa stared at him. “That’s the best answer I’ve heard.”
Another night: “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever wanted someone to say to you?”
Perry blinked. “That they hated me, but still wanted me around.”
She grinned. “Mmm. Codependent poetry.”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re not.”
Later: “What if your sadness is your last real feeling?”
pinned «»
Juliet stared at it in silence. The corners of the photo were still warm from travel, the ink smudged in places like it had been held too tightly. She studied the image for a long time, trying to decipher what she was supposed to feel. Grief? Relief? Pity? She felt none of them. Just a dull ache in the spot where, years ago, her heart used to race.
Without ceremony, she held the Polaroid over the sink and lit a match.
The photo burned quietly—first the edges, then the face, then the words. She watched until the last curl of ash dropped into the porcelain basin. And then she rinsed it all away.
No questions. No search. No closure.
Just flame.
---
Time did what it always does. It moved on.
Juliet climbed the ladder of her career. She changed cities, then changed her name. She bought a condo with high ceilings and cold floors. She filled her life with meetings and noise. She dated, occasionally. She drank, socially. She kept everything sterile and tight and curated—nothing sentimental, nothing soft.
But every now and then, something would break through. A dream. A voice in a crowd. The sound of someone saying “I only love you the most” in a movie or a commercial, and her chest would tighten like someone had reached through her ribs and tugged.
She would sit still for a moment, clutching her wine glass or laptop or steering wheel, and let the memory pass. Then she would bury it under the next to-do list.
Years went by.
Then one morning, in a town she hadn’t visited since before the collapse, Juliet stepped into a nondescript motel for a client shoot. The walls were beige. The carpets still dizzying. Nothing had changed, not really. It was the kind of place people went to forget where they were going—or where they'd been.
She excused herself after the second round of photos and walked down the hallway alone, trailing her fingers along the cracked wallpaper.
Something pulled her toward room 216. She didn’t know why. Didn’t pretend to.
The door wasn’t locked.
Inside, the room smelled faintly of mildew and old perfume. The furniture was the same kind she remembered—cheap, scratchy, beige-on-beige. But the room was empty.
Almost.
On the bedside table, sitting upright in a halo of dust, was Marigold.
Juliet didn’t move at first. The doll stared forward, her button eyes unblinking, her smile exactly as Romeo had once described—“constant and kind.” The scarf around her neck was faded now, the yarn hair knotted and dry. Her dress was stained. She hadn’t been touched in years.
Juliet stepped closer.
Something in her wanted to laugh. Another part wanted to run. But she did neither. She just sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her.
“Still here, huh?” she said softly.
The doll didn’t answer.
Juliet wasn’t sure how long she sat there. Minutes. Maybe longer. The silence pressed against her ribs until something cracked—not loudly, but like a sigh after too long holding your breath.
She reached out and touched the doll’s hand.
It was cold. Of course it was.
“You were the one he stayed with,” Juliet whispered, her voice barely audible. “You got everything I didn’t.”
The doll said nothing. But Juliet imagined she could hear the whisper anyway.
“I only love you the most.”
Tears came, not in a rush, but slow and stinging. The kind that had been waiting for years, curled up in some quiet corner of her body. She didn’t wipe them away.
She wasn’t sad. Not exactly.
Just… hollowed out.
“I used to think he was broken,” she said. “That he couldn’t love anything properly. But maybe I was just something he was trying to survive.”
She stood then, wiping her hands on her coat.
She didn’t take the doll.
She left her sitting there in the dust and the quiet, like a monument to a kind of love that had stopped making sense the moment the world demanded it explain itself.
As she closed the door behind her, Juliet whispered to the silence:
“He loved you more than he ever loved me.”
And she meant it.
💔 The End 💔
“Runaway Romantic: Man Travels with Talking Doll, Claims She's His Wife”
A blurry photo showed Romeo, hair longer now, stubble on his jaw, smiling as he held the doll in his arms. The article was half-mocking, half-sympathetic. It quoted his blog, referred to him as a modern-day Don Quixote, and noted that he had “walked away from the pressures of conformity and embraced a love beyond convention.”
Juliet’s thumb hovered over the screen. For a moment, she considered calling the number he had posted at the end of one blog entry. Just to say—what? Come home? You’re embarrassing me? Or maybe something smaller, softer: I miss you.
But she didn’t call. She closed the app and told the driver to take her to the next meeting.
.......
The motel stays became a rhythm for Romeo. He moved from town to town, rarely staying longer than a week. He left notes for the cleaning staff, thanking them for not disturbing Marigold’s rest. He bought her new outfits from secondhand stores. Once, he got her a ring—plastic, purple, from a vending machine. He slid it onto her stiff finger and whispered, “Now you’re truly mine.”
He stopped speaking to real people unless absolutely necessary. The world outside felt fake, too fast, too dismissive. With Marigold, he didn’t have to justify his sadness. She didn’t interrupt him when he spoke. She didn’t roll her eyes. She never changed.
His blog followers grew. Some mocked him, sure. But others—lonely souls, the heartbroken, the strange and the curious—began leaving comments.
“I get it, man. Sometimes love doesn’t fit the world.”
“She’s lucky to have someone who listens.”
“Keep going. Tell her story.”
He read every comment aloud to Marigold. “See?” he’d say. “They understand. We’re not alone.”
.......
Juliet saw another headline weeks later. This one was on television, playing on mute in a restaurant during a networking dinner. She was mid-conversation with a marketing executive when she glanced up and saw the screen:
“The Doll Husband: Is He Mentally Ill or a Symbol of Modern Heartbreak?”
There was a short video clip of Romeo walking into a motel lobby, hand in hand with Marigold. His eyes looked wild. Joyful. Untouched by shame.
Juliet excused herself from the table. She went to the bathroom and splashed water on her face. Her reflection stared back, as perfect and exhausted as ever. She looked like someone who had everything under control. And maybe she did.
She didn’t cry. She hadn’t in months.
Instead, she took out her phone and opened her calendar. She scheduled a meeting for the next morning. Then another. Then another.
By the time she returned to the table, the headline was gone. The executive was laughing at something. The world was still spinning.
And Juliet—she smiled like nothing inside her had broken.
Because they had both disappeared in their own way.
Romeo into a world that wasn’t real.
And Juliet into one that was—
But hurt just the same.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
IV.
Romeo vanished the way smoke does—slowly at first, then all at once.
There was no blog update. No final poem. No farewell to Marigold. One day, the posts simply stopped. His last entry was titled “She Blinked.” A blurry photograph of the doll sat beneath it, propped up on a motel bedspread, lit by the cheap golden light of a single bedside lamp. The caption read only:
“She knows something I don’t.”
No one noticed at first. People assumed he’d moved on, or been institutionalized, or—more realistically—grown tired of his act. The world moved quickly. Stories fell out of fashion. Juliet, of course, saw it too, though she never clicked through the article again. She just stared at the headline sitting in her search history like a bruise that hadn’t faded.
Weeks passed. Then months. Then a letter arrived—handwritten, no return address.
Inside was a single Polaroid.
Marigold sat alone in a motel room, lit by morning. The bed was unmade. The lamp was off. The door was ajar, casting a long shadow across the carpet. On the back of the photo, in Romeo’s handwriting, it said:
“She waited. I couldn’t.”
A few nights later, Juliet dreamt that Romeo was a boy again, hiding behind a curtain, clutching Marigold like a talisman. In the dream, she called his name, but he didn’t hear her. He was humming to himself, eyes glazed, rocking gently.
When she woke, her hands were shaking. There was a voice still ringing in her ears—clear, loud, and unmistakable. Not from the dream. Not from her imagination.
She walked slowly to the living room. Romeo was asleep on the floor, arms wrapped around Marigold. The doll was staring straight at Juliet.
The room felt colder than it should have been.
The crack had started. Not just in their marriage. Not just in Juliet’s dreams. But somewhere deeper—underneath everything.
And it wasn’t going away.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
III.
It happened without warning. One morning, Juliet woke to silence that felt different—thicker, more final. No clinking of cups. No murmured conversation with the doll. The apartment was eerily still, and for a few minutes, she let herself believe he had gone out for a walk, or to pick up milk like he sometimes did on rare, lucid mornings.
But when she checked the closet, half of his clothes were gone. The drawer where he kept his notebooks was empty. His guitar, always leaning against the wall by the window, had vanished. And worst of all—so had Marigold.
Juliet stood in the middle of the bedroom, barefoot, her hair tangled with sleep. Her heart didn’t race. Her breath didn’t catch. She simply stared at the open spaces he had left behind and felt… nothing.
She made coffee. Drank it in silence. Then she dressed for work.
She didn’t call him. Didn’t text. Didn’t check the GPS on his phone. She had done those things before, and none of them had ever brought him back—not really. Romeo had been disappearing long before he physically left. Now, he had only made it official.
.......
Romeo took a train out of the city and checked into the first roadside motel that didn’t smell too strongly of mildew. He used the name "M. Gold" on the check-in form. It amused him. The clerk didn’t question it.
The room was small—one bed, one television, the carpet patterned in a dizzying swirl of maroon and beige. But Romeo treated it like a palace. He placed Marigold gently on the pillow and unpacked her belongings with care: a scarf, a broken comb, one of Juliet’s old bracelets.
“This is our new home,” he whispered, kissing the top of her yarn hair. “No one to make us feel small. No one to take you away.”
Over the next few days, he built a world for them. He ordered room service and laid out tiny plates for Marigold, narrating her preferences aloud. “She doesn’t like eggs. We’ll just have toast, thank you.” He walked with her through nearby parks, cradling her in his arms like a porcelain bride. He spoke to her constantly—in elevators, in public restrooms, at gas stations. He told her stories of their future, where they’d buy a house with a garden full of marigolds, where people respected love that didn’t follow rules.
He began writing a blog. "Letters to Marigold." He posted photos of her in motel windows, in restaurants, sitting by the pool with sunglasses on. Each post came with a poetic caption.
“True love isn’t bound by time. It listens, even when no one else will.”
Somewhere along the line, people started noticing.
.......
Back in the city, Juliet worked twelve-hour days and told herself it was normal. She took meetings during lunch, answered emails on weekends, and accepted every new campaign offered to her. Her coworkers whispered when she passed through halls—there was something brittle in the way she smiled, something forced in the way she laughed.
She’d started sleeping at the office sometimes. It was easier than going home to an apartment that echoed. When she did return, it was to shower and change clothes. She didn’t rearrange anything. She didn’t throw away the last cup he drank from. She didn’t open the drawer that still held one of his sweaters.
The first time she saw the headline, she was in a cab, scrolling through her news app between calls.
She threw herself deeper into her career. Every new project became an escape route. Every all-nighter at the office felt like a rescue mission. She told herself she was building something—her future, her independence, her worth. But deep down, she was running. Not from Romeo, but from the growing weight of what she had failed to hold together.
They passed each other like strangers in their own home. Words exchanged were sparse, practical, void of warmth.
“We’re out of almond milk.”
“I’ll add it to the order.”
“Have you seen my headphones?”
“They’re by the doll.”
Juliet flinched every time she heard the word doll.
One evening, she walked into the living room to find Romeo dancing. Vinyl played from the old turntable—something jazzy and slow. He moved with Marigold in his arms, spinning her stiff body gently as if she were made of silk. Her head lolled against his shoulder as he whispered something into her plastic ear.
Juliet stood frozen. Not with anger. Not even with sadness. But with the kind of fear you don’t know how to name.
“Are you okay?” she asked finally.
Romeo looked up, startled. Then smiled.
“She missed this song.”
Juliet didn’t reply. She walked to the bedroom and locked the door.
.......
The dreams began a week later. Vivid, immersive, and always ending the same way—with a whisper in the dark.
“I only love you the most.”
In one, she stood in a field of plastic dolls, each with button eyes and twisted smiles. They all spoke at once in that same mechanical tone, their voices overlapping in a dissonant lullaby. She tried to run, but their hands reached out, clutching at her ankles, their grip cold and unyielding.
In another, she was standing in their apartment, but everything was submerged. Not in water, but in paper. Tiny slips falling endlessly from the ceiling, each one stamped with the same sentence:
“I only love you the most.”
She couldn’t breathe beneath them. Couldn’t find Romeo. Only the doll, perched high above it all, staring.
She began waking up in sweats, panting, her chest tight as if she’d run miles. And yet, by morning, she would shake it off. She had meetings. Calls. A life that needed her attention.
Still, she began noticing small things. Once, she found Marigold sitting at her vanity table, propped up beside her perfume bottles, wearing a shawl Juliet hadn’t touched in years. Another time, the doll had lipstick smeared across her cheek—Juliet’s shade, though she hadn’t worn it in weeks.
When she confronted Romeo, he only smiled.
“She missed you. Thought you might want to see her made up.”
Juliet turned away.
She started staying later at work, even when she didn’t have to. Her team noticed. Her assistant even asked if she was alright. She brushed it off with a laugh. “Just one of those months.” But at night, she would sit alone in her office, not working, just staring at the window as if the city lights could answer questions she wasn’t brave enough to ask.
.......
One night, near midnight, she came home to find Romeo sitting in the dark. Marigold was perched on the coffee table, facing him like a therapist. A single candle flickered between them.
“I told her about the dream I had,” he said as Juliet walked in. “She understands.”
Juliet didn’t speak. She simply dropped her bag, sat across from him, and stared.
“What do you want from me, Romeo?” she asked after a long silence.
He looked at her as though the question made no sense.
“I just want you to love me.”
“I never stopped.”
“But you left,” he said softly, voice trembling. “You left a long time ago and never came back.”
Juliet opened her mouth to respond, but no words came. Maybe because he was right. Maybe because the guilt was too heavy to lift. Or maybe because she didn’t know when it had started to die—just that it had, slowly, in silence.
She got up and walked to the bedroom. Behind her, she heard the soft chime:
“I only love you the most.”
.......
