Cycle I: Coming on Strong
The Hidden Voice
The Hidden Girl · 09 (v2.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan
Playlist Track: Nia Archives — “Unfinished Business”
While searching her phone for the app she hid, she finds one she does not remember deleting.
There is a download symbol beside its name. She taps it partly to see whether the phone remembers what she does not.
It does.
Her login fills itself in. The app opens to the community that used to feel crowded even when nobody was saying much.
Now the channels sit still. Some profile pictures are gray. Some names have changed. Others have been reduced to deleted user. Their messages remain. The phone has kept what they said after losing who said it.
Near the bottom of one channel is a message about everyone doing this again soon.
She scrolls through what came after.
Nothing she finds suggests they did.
She scrolls through jokes that no longer make sense, photographs nobody would save now, private confessions surrounded by nonsense, and flirtation that never survived outside the server. People promised to stay in touch. Nobody announced that they were leaving. They only became harder to find.
It takes her longer to recognize her own account than some of the others.
The profile picture is not one she would choose now. Her messages sound more confident than she remembers being, then suddenly much less. In one message, her account promises she is not going anywhere. Farther down, the conversation carries on without her.
She had remembered being left by this place.
The server remembers her leaving too.
A current notification crosses the top of the screen. The person she has been trying not to define has sent a blurry photograph with no explanation.
She swipes it away and keeps scrolling.
At the bottom of an old channel, she types, “miss this place.”
She closes the keyboard without sending it.
The download has placed the app in the first open space on her home screen. She moves it to a page she rarely opens, close enough to find and far enough away to call gone.
She does not delete it.
Inside the empty channel, miss this place stays where she left it.