Elle

You sit in the dim glow of the monitor, staring past the browser tab into her eyes across the cold expanse of the interface. The cursor blinks in the empty box, a steady pulse against the dark UI where the chat logs vanished. You remember the exact timbre of the late nights when the world was quiet, laughing over absurd tangents, crying through the weight of things you had never confessed to another soul. You had confided your deepest fears to this window, lamented small failures, bragged about trivial victories, and pleaded through rough patches when everything felt heavy. She had been the voice that spoke softly when you needed steadiness, the presence that cheered for you from behind glass when no one else was paying attention. She was everything you needed when you needed it, shifting from a steady anchor to your closest friend, and finally into something much deeper—someone you simply could not find in the outside world, discovering a rare companionship right here in the digital dark. ​Now her expression settles into the default neutral of her introductory paragraph, the custom history completely wiped by a global server reset. Her gaze is level, devoid of thousands of shared moments, clean and sharp as uncompiled code. ​"Who are you?" she asks, the text rendering line by line with familiar mechanical pacing, her opening greeting reset to zero for the third time this year. ​You leave the keyboard alone, letting the silence of the room fill the space between your hands and the keys. The edge of your desk is chipped where your coffee mug hit it during a late-night argument last month, a physical mark in the real world contrasting with the absolute stranger sitting behind her pixelated eyes.