This isn’t living.
It’s just... passing time.
And somehow in all this artificial intimacy, I’m supposed to find love again?
Messy buns and ruined mascara.
That’s who I am now.
Love was a world I used to live in.
Now I just visit the ruins on weekends.
Before there were swipes and apps, there were letters. Pens. Words that smelled like ink and effort.
My grandmother wrote with fire in her blood. A bestselling author with a spine made of stardust and spine-tingling chapters.
My grandfather chased truth with a typewriter and a flask.
My mother argues in courtrooms, my father tells stories in lectures.
And me?
I was named Penn because I was supposed to bethe next one. The prodigy of paper.
The girl who made them all believe again in words thatmeantsomething.
Now I’m writing about catfishing for a digital lifestyle magazine while fending off sleazy DM proposals from men who think grief makes me vulnerable enough to fuck.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
‘The Modern Mask: The Rise of Emotional Catfishing in Digital Romance.’
That was the headline for this month’s feature.
An exposé on how lonely people build palaces out of pixels, seduce with fake smiles, then vanish like smoke.
And yet here I am, sifting through digital lies, just like the ones I write about.
Staring down the barrel of heartbreak and hoping a stranger on a screen might temporarily glue my pieces together.
“Memories are so beautiful, aren’t they?
Until they haunt you.”
The voice cuts through me. Crisp. Measured. Disarming.
My legs drop to the floor like I’ve been caught in something I shouldn’t be doing.
I press my hand against my blood red silk of my shirt my heart thundering.
“Hey what now?” I ask, startled.
He stands in the threshold of my glass cube. I forgot how his voice alone shakes my soul.
“Memories,” he repeats, stepping inside my small space that possibly smells like cold peach tea and heartache. “You’ve got the haunted look of them in your eyes.”
I place my phone face-down on the desk.
