Loss

Her habit was always to check her computer whenever she came back to the apartment. Walk into the room, carefully stepping around the piles of clothes and yarn, and brush her fingers across the touch pad to activate the hibernating machine. Today, a messenger window blinked on the screen, a message from the boy she'd crushed on so desperately at one time. "she felt something when she kissed me, and that was rare". It created one of those pangs, somewhere internal, that seem to intensify feelings of longing and loss.

She met him on an online RPG. She was ashamed to admit it. She flirted shamelessly at first, intoxicated with the feeling of power when he told her that, if they didn't live on other sides of the country, he would haunt her doorstep. She was always too proud or too scared to validate his feelings, and eventually, their strong personalities clashed, and they stopped speaking. When she reinitiated contact a few years later, he was in love with someone else. She has his phone number programmed into her cell phone, and she tells herself that someday she will call it.