I Had An Online-Only Relationship
By Natasha Lioe
You wake up to the sound of your phone ringing and it vibrates your entire bed and you glance at the screen and you see that it is him and suddenly you are only hardly groggy and you pick up and you whisper hi and he says “good morning sunshine” and you smile and giggle so he knows you smiled and then you say “good morning babe” and he chuckles quietly to himself. He tells you to wake the fuck up and you say fuck you and you both laugh and you say okay I have to get ready now and he says goodbye and you say goodbye and you regretfully hang up and then you get ready with the mindset that you are going to meet him today so you try a little harder than most days and you rush out the door with your binder nearly slipping out of your hands and then you drive to school. And then it is school for the day.
It is a Friday, 10 minutes before you get off of school, and you are squirming in your seat because you cannot wait to get home. The clock continues on, ticking and ticking and you are about to explode but the clock does that before you, and the bell rings and you rush out the door, through the halls crowded with people and you are turning the keys in your ignition to turn on your engine. You drive off and you wait and you wait for the traffic light, tapping on your steering wheel while listening to The Kooks because he put them on a playlist that he made for you and you drive and drive for about three songs and you open the garage and drop your bag on the floor and furiously press space bar on your computer until it wakes up from its nap and you log into Skype and say hi, hello dear one I have missed you so.
And he says, “Hello darling I could not stop thinking about you the entire day how are you how was your day why don’t you have boba today?”
“Because I like you more than boba today,” you reply, half assed because you know how ridiculously cheesy that sounds. You laugh and you giggle to yourself and to him, trying to make yourself look cute, flipping your hair so that it falls naturally onto your shoulders, or at least that’s what it looks like through the webcam.
“Aww. You’re so cute. Hey, you look cute today, as always, have I told you that?” He says. You roll your eyes at him and you sarcastically reply, “Are you going to call me cute 100 times again?”
“Challenge accepted,” he says. “That counts as one. Wanna play a game?”
You say sure, because you know he loves to carry you and because you know that you will feel closer to each other because you will be close on screen and you can ult together and it’s just really important that you play bot lane together. You say sure, because you just want another excuse to spend time with him, and playing games is what sets you apart from those other girls right?
And today your Skype call lasts 13 hours, your longest time ever and you haven’t gotten tired of each other which is very obviously a sign that you are perfect together. And even in losing he still likes you and he still calls you cute and every time he gets a kill or you get an assist he calls you cute and you smile each time less and less because suddenly getting called cute is getting quite boring.
And finally at 4 a.m., after he has stayed on while you afked to go take a shower and after he ate dinner with his family downstairs and you stayed on and the call was nearing 14 hours, you agree to part ways on the webcam and switch to a different method of communication: telephone. The good old telephone, and aren’t you glad you have a cute voice and you like the sound of his laugh? You can’t spend any time apart so he calls you before you can hang the Skype call up and you walk away from your computer, unwilling to hang up the call, resisting any reason for him to think that you are bored of him.
Because let’s face it. After 14 hours of nonstop talking and smiling with him your face muscles are starting to hurt because you crinkle your eyes in an effort to produce a bright expression in your eyes and you know he thinks it’s cute, after more than 10 games of league of legends and after watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother together, you are beginning to think that you are falling in love but you don’t like to fall or trip or stumble you only like to glide with the reassurance that you will not hurt yourself on the way down or when you get to the bottom.
So on the phone, you decide, you will end whatever you have with him before it gets too serious. Because you know that long distance relationships never last and you know that you are only making him fall in love with you more and more and you know that you are kind of out of his league and smarter than him and more interesting and he is a lake while you are an ocean, but you tried to excuse that because most people are just glasses of water.
You’re cold and abrasive and you carve holes in rocks because you are an ocean, and you are polluted and unclean and mysterious and this only makes him fall more in love but you have to end it, you need to end it because a lake would be flooded by an ocean if no dam was built.
So you start off slow, you beat around the bush for maybe 2 minutes, acting as if you are depressed and mentally ill which you probably are, in all honesty, and you say something like “I wish I could hold your hand right now,” and he becomes silent and you can almost see the pain on his face, as he is torn he is just as torn as you, don’t you crave at least a little touch do you think you can last until college? Don’t you want to see how you walk next to him and how maybe your arms dangle at a perfect length for each other? And you say this and you say you feel so empty, that it hurts so much every night because you just wish he could be with you, you wish that you had met that you had gone to the same school that you grew up in the same city, because then you would really be made for each other.
And he sighs and you can feel the pain in his chest too and it gets hard to breathe and you sigh and say that it is probably best just not to continue, just to end it at this because we will always remember each other in a good light, just that the relationship has run its course. And you can hear him with his irregular breathing on the other line and you apologize profusely for what you have done, for leading him on, for flirting and giggling and throwing pick up lines into the atmosphere and he says that it is his fault, because he was so stupid, and in broken thoughts he tells you that he has never felt so strongly about a girl until you came along and you hate yourself. You hate yourself because you knew this would happen.
You inhale and exhale once more before saying goodbye on the phone and you press the red button and a part of you dies inside, because no longer are you going to make it through every school day.