The First Text
Chapter 1 – The First Text
It began the night after I got rejected. I wasn’t angry, not even sad—just empty in a way that felt familiar. I remember scrolling through my phone, trying to drown out the quiet, when a message appeared. She wasn’t the girl who turned me down. She was someone else—someone who had seen the small mess my world had become. Her text was simple: “Why is she saying that about you?” It should have ended there, a one-time concern, a brief moment of kindness. But it didn’t. That night she said goodnight—even though we hadn’t really talked. The next morning came with another notification: “good morning :)” I hadn’t replied to the last one, yet she still sent it. It started to happen every day. Tiny, ordinary messages that somehow meant more than they should have. A “gm” that felt like sunlight. A “gn” that arrived just when the world went quiet. We began to talk about nothing and everything: half-typed jokes, games we played until midnight, screenshots of silly wins. Somewhere between her laughter written in letters and the silence that followed after, I felt something gentle forming. It wasn’t love yet—maybe not even close—but it was peace. And peace, after everything, felt rare. I didn’t know it then, but those goodnights were already becoming memories—soft echoes in a chat window that would one day fall silent.
Sometimes I still scroll up, reread those messages, and wonder if she ever does the same. Maybe somewhere, between a goodnight she didn’t send and a morning I didn’t reply to, we lost each other.
