There’s someone — let’s say she, for now — lying on her back in the dark, phone above her face, thumb hovering over an empty message field. She’s already broken every childhood rule about strangers; half her life is DMs and servers and late-night chats with people whose real names she doesn’t know. What stops her tonight isn’t fear of them, it’s the line from this post echoing louder than the rest: “So… what do you want?”
She scrolls back up, rereads it for the third time, and realizes she’s always framed it the other way around — What do they want from me? How do I not get tricked? How do I avoid being stupid? For the first time in a long time, she closes the app without sending anything. Not because she’s cured of wanting, but because she can feel a new question forming under her skin: if she actually had to answer that honestly, to herself, what would she even say?
She plugs her phone in, face lit by the charging screen — same ritual, same spot on the pillow every night — and tells herself it’s just sleep. But the real thing keeping her quiet is that one, small, annoying spark of self-awareness: strangers are easy to find; it’s her own answer she’s been dodging.
Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 01
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