After finishing my usual evening chores, I finally crawled into bed. My mother lay right beside me, her face illuminated by the glow of her phone screen as she scrolled through the news. I reached for my own device, and a notification caught my eye.
It was him. The boy from k-City.
We had met in the digital ether of social media, a place where it's easy to be brave. I wasn't the type to meet strangers, yet something about his "decency"—a rare, quiet kind of kindness—had led me to meet him three times.
"How was your day, dear?"
The pet name felt like a weight. He never used my actual name, as if "Elena" was too formal for the version of me he held in his head. He had confessed his feelings so many times that they had become a backdrop to our friendship, like the sound of distant traffic.
"I'm fine," I replied, my thumbs hovering. "And what about you?"
"I missed you. I had a feeling you'd message me tonight."
I stared at the words. "Why?"
"I don't know. I just missed you."
We talked for over an hour that night, the blue light of the screen bridging the distance between us. I struggled to understand the depth of his feelings, or even my own. But even as the conversation flowed, a familiar shadow hung over me.
The glimpses of that other world—the one that existed behind the glass of the mirror—still bothered me, pulling at the edges of my thoughts.
Eventually, exhaustion won, and sleep took me once again…..
The morning arrived, and I woke at my usual time. It had become a habit now to check the mirror first thing. Every morning, I looked into it, carrying a small, fragile seed of hope.
"Christmas is coming, I guess?"
I turned to see my grandmother. She was already fretting about the holiday, and we had barely been awake for five minutes.
"Elena, look at the calendar," she insisted.
"It's in two or three days, Grandma," I answered softly, keeping my voice down so as not to wake my mother, who was still fast asleep beside me.
She was worrying about the Christmas before the kettle had even whistled. I sat up slowly, glancing at my mother's sleeping form.
"It's in two or three days, Grandma," I whispered, my voice thick with sleep.
"We have time."
But as I looked back at the mirror, I wondered if time was the one thing I was actually running out of.