Create a Story - Week 6

So this is supposed to be a romance story, which is usually a strong point. Maybe if I'd written it longer it might have been? This prompt comes from page 48 of the Create a Story prompt book. For those who don't have it, feel free to guess the prompt or what the words I needed to include were. I've written a bit about my back injury and last week I had a procedure done to help with the pain. Let's just say it placed writing outside what I could do. We'll see if I can catch up. In the meantime, this is more romantic than romance, but romance is hard in a really short form, because you need a Happily Ever After (or at least happy for now) and it's hard to build two true characters and an iron clad romance this short without shortcutting by using fanfic or something similar to shortcut character development. Anyway, hopefully this hits true.

Loneliness in a Pandemic Chat

The loneliness was crushing. The pandemic was isolating for families, yes. For students living six to an apartment really meant for three? Crowded. But for a young adult who aged out of university with a degree and a job, living alone? It meant a reality where every stranger at the grocery store was a feared vector for the viral threat that had terrorized the world, and at the same time a human contact—forbidden, enticing, and kept at the safely prescribed distance.

He was supposed to feel lucky. That was the irony. He had an apartment of his own. He didn’t have roommates. Unlike so many of his generation, he didn’t need to. His job was enough to do that. The lens of the camera was his friend. He could look into it and pretend that was eye contact. He was good at that. Making the screen seem like real contact with the clients, with his coworkers and superiors. Keeping up the careful appearance of sanity.

But the loneliness was there. It was more of a townhouse than an apartment building. Four people in a shared building. A whole community of modest units, but remote work meant he was unlikely to see any of the others. Loneliness was supposed to save him. Protect him somehow from a government that still half refused to acknowledge what the virus was, what it meant. Keep him from even the temptation to yield to the weakness of touch.

​Work took most of his time. More than they paid him for, certainly, as much for lack of anything else to do. He should be developing hobbies or working his way through his dad’s collection of eighties video tapes. Instead he worked far too much, slept far too little, and spent the wee hours of the night and morning in chat rooms. He was so practiced with switching screens that he barely noticed the quick clicks of the mouse anymore. One computer application to the next. One game to another.

Sometimes he’d find another person’s words to occupy him. They were as lonely as his. As quietly devastated. Haltingly eager to whisper in text.

Even in a pandemic, working too many hours, it took missing one of those chats for him to realize what that was. An empty ache. Butterflies. A need to type words he would have been afraid to say. 

Typing words should be easier, but it wasn’t. How could it be easier when he didn’t have a voice, a face, when the person that held this achingly perfect space in his head was just glowing pixels on a giant screen he’d had bought the second week, before the last stores closed down and everyone waited for them to figure out store pickup.

​The space was scary and warm at the same time. It was comfort offered. It was kindness. Could he ignore that the teasing had grown closer and more private… personal. This was more. It had to be.

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Okay, at this point keeping them 500 words is a little artificial, but when you can only sit for a few minutes at a time to write, it makes sense to keep to a limit. I did write a pandemic romance for National Novel Writing Month during the pandemic. Frankly, it was better, but I'd never let anyone read it... it got very dark. We'll see if I can catch up and write a second story this week.