Cycle I: Coming on Strong
The Hidden Voice
The Hidden Girl · 23 (v2.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan
Playlist Track: Kelela & PinkPantheress — “the bridge”
The nearly empty profile becomes less empty once she starts asking questions.
At first, his answers stay inside messages. When one gets too long, a voice note appears instead. His voice has pauses his writing does not. He changes his mind halfway through a sentence and leaves the first version there.
She likes that. It makes him sound unfinished in a way she recognizes.
She asks why his profile says almost nothing. He says he kept rewriting it until he realized he did not know anyone there well enough to explain himself to them.
She almost tells him that her own profile has been rewritten around people she barely knows. Instead, she reacts to the voice note and asks another question.
They add each other on another app because the site keeps losing messages. The profile pictures stay the same, but the notification sound is different. His name looks less accidental in her contacts.
She moves the app onto the first screen of her phone.
When he asks how much experience she has, she starts with some. Then she deletes it.
“mostly messages,” she writes. “mostly things i thought i understood while i was typing them.”
He does not call that experience. He does not call it nothing. He asks what she knows now.
They talk about check-ins. She asks whether a dynamic means he would expect to know where she is and what she is doing. He says that depends on what they agree to. She still gets to have a life when he is not looking at it.
At first, she reads the space in that answer as distance.
Then she reads it again.
Later, one of her messages sits unanswered while he is active somewhere else. She types, “guess you’re busy,” and watches it turn into the kind of accusation that can still pretend to be a joke.
She deletes it.
When he comes back, he continues the conversation without an excuse large enough to match the one she invented. Nothing happened in the space except what she put there.
Then he remembers something she said before they changed apps.
She pins the conversation.
Afterward, she opens their old thread on the site and scrolls back to the beginning. His first message is still, “did you mean to view my page?”
It makes the connection look older than it feels.
She lets it.