It began with a smile.
Not the one you find on a stranger's face in a coffee shop — but the one that appears in pixels, bound so beautifully by golden light, shared innocently to change a life… and it did.
He was famous. Unattainable. A face she had no right to fall in love with. And yet, she did.
"It hurts that I can only stare at his photos", she sighed.
Initially, it was only admiration — a secret crush on a guy from another nation who had no idea I was alive. But days turned into weeks, and his pictures, his smile, even the spaces between his updates, started to become pieces of my own beat.
The night went on and on, as if it had gobbled up the world itself. Laura was bent on her bed, phone cradled in her hand, flipping through the old feed for the hundredth time. Each photo, each post, each small like a lifeline she grabbed onto, though it squeezed her chest with a quiet, stubborn yearning.
There he was once more—Evan. Just an image, just a smile, just a view of a world she could only reach by touching it from afar. A life that appeared out of reach, and yet somehow irresistible, attracting something she couldn't define. The attraction was not rational. It was not safe. It was not supposed to be. And yet she felt it anyway.
Her room had a lingering scent of coffee and stale textbooks, leftovers from a day spent with nose buried deep in assignments she couldn't recall getting through. She'd laugh if anyone could see her now—sitting alone, half heart in the real world, half in a dream that could never be hers.
A gentle trill of her laptop startled her. A message. A small recognition, a glimmer of contact, and the world had been made a little lighter for an instant. She smiled, then questioned herself.
Was it enough? Did it have any significance at all?
Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she was aware that she wasn't alone in this. Someone always was—someone who chuckled at her terrible jokes, teased her for her late-night browsing, and in some strange way perceived all the things in her that she didn't expose to anyone else. But tonight, that someone wasn't there. Tonight, it was only her, the screen, and a name that kept her restless.
Laura didn't realize how long she stayed there before she finally hung up the phone, a still determination in her heart. The world outside was black, rainy, and out of reach—but perhaps, only perhaps, she would be able to find a means to live in it. Somehow. Someday.
And somehow, she would begin with maintaining her balance in the one world she could still reach out to, the one that she had with Aiden, her anchor in the still quiet storm of her own desire.