He stared at the tablet. His index finger hovering over the icon on the last hope he had in life. It still showed her as offline...invisible, but he could see that she had been active. She was currently in voice, talking to someone right now, and had left his last few messages ignored. He felt helpless, hopeless, and abandoned. He told himself he should have known. He berated himself for allowing his feelings to grow. He had been safe in his walls of despondency. His fortress of classical nihilism, nothing mattered so it was ok to never let his feelings free.
She had spent months talking to him, opening up to him, and he to her, despite his reservations. In spite of his beliefs that everything was a dark miasma of inanity, he found himself falling for her. She spent hours talking to him in text. Paragraphs at a time were written back and forth. He found himself caring more and more about her. He couldn't wait until they would pick up their conversations. They seemed to match perfectly, like two trinkets forged from the same mold.
He scrolled backwards across the history of their conversations. Seeing the beginning and all their long discussions, then seeing the present where single sentences were written, at most. Often it was just a word or two. He knew things had changed. Time modifies communication in a relationship from long conversations to a familiar shorthand, but this was different. This felt ominous to their future. He tried to talk to her about it. Once, he even tried to put a stop to it entirely, having felt the devolution of their closeness. He resolved to end their conversations because he felt the decay, the bond slipping loose.
She didn't like that he was pulling away and they had a long conversation about his failures to communicate what he was feeling, and he should just voice his concerns if he had a problem. It felt like their first real conflict. In the end, he believed her that all was fine, and he was just misinterpreting the fewer messages, the clipped conversations.
All seemed fine for a month, things seemed normal again. They had longer conversations and even talks about the future, for a while. He started to see it again, the same thing as before, watching their conversations fading again. He could feel the distance, the drawing away. The pain inside was almost unbearable because she was his only contact to the outside world. No, he corrected himself. It wasn't pain. It was emptiness. A hollow emptiness inside of him that felt like his torso was a bottomless pit, nothing left inside but loss and sadness.
He stared at the icon on his tablet again, shaking his head. He had gone out of his way to make sure he could talk to her when his computer failed. A week ago, he tried to log into his computer and the monitor wouldn't light up. He hit the power on the case, and nothing. It was dead. The monitors seemed to be working, but he wasn't getting any input to them. He felt a small moment of panic because that was his only way to talk to her. It was the only solace he had in the cold absence, the nothingness of his life. He couldn't write her on his work computer. It was locked down, unable to access anything but what was needed for work. The same with his phone. It was only to be used for support so it was locked down as well, and he didn't have another phone of his own. Why would he? He never talked to anyone. He felt stressed and sad and worry about not being able to talk to her, thinking she might think he was upset at her because he just stopped writing. He didn't want her to feel the things he was feeling.
He willed himself to leave the apartment. He didn't like leaving. It wasn't agoraphobia necessarily, but he did not feel comfortable outside of his home. He avoided leaving his home whenever possible. He didn't feel like he had a choice now though. He couldn't afford to buy a new computer, and he had deadlines at work that took up all his free time, so he wasn't going to be able to troubleshoot his broken PC.
Honestly, he thought to himself, does it really matter? She is pulling away again anyway. Maybe this is just a sign from the gods that I need to stop trying to make this work. This entire thing is a fantasy that felt like a fairy tale story and somehow keeps corrupting itself into a minor tragedy. But he wasn't willing to leave things like that where she didn't know what was happening. Would she care? He didn't know anymore. Somehow, he doubted it at this point, but he couldn't leave that to chance. He, perhaps stupidly, said to himself, that he cared about her and didn't want her to feel abandoned.
He logged out of his work computer, grabbed his keys and wallet, and walked to the front door. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened the door, stepping outside. He wasn't scared, but he was uncomfortable, and needed to get acclimated to being outside of his home. He was on the basement floor of the apartment building, and the parking garage had an entrance just to his left. He closed the door behind him, took another breath, and walked to the garage entrance.
Once in the garage, he hit the remote lock on his keychain, the echo of the car alarm bouncing high pitched chirps off the damp concrete of the surrounding walls. He got in his car and started it. He turned on the AC to cool the muggy, humid air of the interior. He shifted into gear and took off, heading for the office. He was reasonably sure he could find a way to talk to her by going through the outdated equipment in the office that was waiting for recycling. There had to be something there. He didn't have space for another computer in his small apartment, where he already had two separate systems; one for personal use and one for work. But maybe he could find an old phone or tablet that would work.
He drove the forty five minutes into the office, and went into the electronic recycling area to find any kind of hardware he could use. He found a stack of tablets that looked promising. Most had been locked out, but he found one older one that had been factory reset. He signed out the gear, put it in his messenger bag, and headed back to his car. He felt relief that he was going to be able to talk to her again and make sure that she knew what happened, that he wasn't ignoring her and he just didn't have any ability to write her. Once again, the thoughts crawled forth, and he wondered if it really mattered. Does she really care at all anyway? We are back to the pulling away stage, he thought to himself, and maybe he should just stop trying to keep this up. The tumultuousness of the relationship, the ups, the downs, the never knowing... He closed his eyes as he sat in his car waiting to leave. How did he let this happen to himself again? He didn't know what to do, but he wasn't making any final life decisions in the parking lot of the place he was employed.
He drove home. He decided he didn't want to listen to any podcasts or interviews or even any of his audio classes he had been taking. He needed to lose himself in music. He didn't listen to music nearly as much as he used to, now mostly listening to podcasts about his career, or studying for school, or sometimes stories about true crime. He changed his library from the Scared to Death podcast and opened up his music folder. He scrolled through a few albums and decided that "The Death of Romance" from Zeromancer was the best thing to listen to in his current situation. The strange, disjointed intro track, which echoing samples and deep, pulsing sounds seemed a fitting soundtrack to what he was feeling now. The woman's voice in the samples overlapping a second conversation of what sounded like a wedding vow, a cacophony of voices and trembling sounds.
When he arrived at his parking garage, the album had completed and, since it was set to repeat, the intro track played again as he parked the car in his assigned spot. He looked down, eyes closed, and let the sounds wash over him, feeling the despair overwhelm him. He didn't know what to do. He wanted the closeness that they had, and he knew all relationships evolved over time, but this felt like the same pushing away again, and he didn't know if he could take it again.
He turned off the car and grabbed the tablet, and headed towards the parking garage door that led towards his apartment. He stepped into the apartment, dropped his keys in the bowl on the table next to him and closed the door behind him, locking the deadbolt without thinking about the motion. He powered on the tablet and dropped into the sofa. He was facing a small flat screen television on the other side of the room. Just enough size for the room he was in. He wasn't interested in television enough to justify one of those ridiculously large screens. He normally didn't use the television at all as he spent most of his time online, but once in a while he liked having something on in the background. Now, this was the only way for him to hear or see anything since his personal computer was dead in the water.
The tablet was an older model, and he had to fight with the configuration a bit because it wasn't uploading the most current updates, which was hindering his ability to download the application he used to communicate with her. He finally found an old browser that allowed him to connect to the channels he wanted and let it use his old headphones to talk to her. He logged into the channel that she was in told her what happened. She said that was unfortunate but she understood. Outside of the channel she was in, she wrote him a message that said she thought he was upset with her, so he was glad that he went through the effort to make sure he could write her. He felt a small amount of relief that he had cleared things up, but he could hear things in her voice, or more accurately, something in the voice was missing, and he feared he had been too late, that maybe she had already started the pulling away from him again.