“You talk like you’ve seen inside my head. Like you already know me.”
I close my eyes.
I do.
Every inch of him.
Every lie.
Every silence.
When it ends, I just stare at the screen my reflection faint in the glass.
There’s no line between Penn and Pandora anymore. Just static. Just ache.
My phone buzzes again. Another message.
“I need you, Pandora. I can’t explain it. It’s like I’ve been asleep for years, and you just woke me up.”
The tears come fast and hot. Because he never said that tome.
Not once.
Not in ten years.
I press my palm against the glow of his name, like it could warm me through the screen. But all it does is burn.
Somewhere deep down, I know I’m breaking myself on purpose. And worse I can’t stop.
And then I leave.
At the Office
Sitting at my desk, high above downtown Wellington, the glass walls spill sunlight I don’t want. Too much light for how dark I feel inside. The city below pulses like a living thing, horns blaring, coffee carts steaming, people weaving through the noise like they belong in it.
All of them pretending.
And me?
I’m just trying not to come undone.
Collecting sins like bottle caps, lining them up in fragile patterns, trying to make them mean something. Trying to matter. Trying to hold still in a world that never did.
I open my laptop. The cursor blinks at me like a heartbeat, waiting for permission to start. So that’s what I do, I move my eyes over the words I wrote the night before, going through them, feeling them and watching as the memories bleed into the draft.
Love me with Lies: The Art of Catfishing
It promises insight, not heartbreak. It hides how close the knife really is to my own skin.
We live in an age where love is a transaction of pixels and half-truths. Where connection comes in curated bursts filtered faces, clever bios, the illusion of being seen. But what happens when the person behind the screen isn’t who they say they are?
I pause. The irony is heavy, almost cruel. Because tonight, I’m not just writing about the lie. I’m building it.
Catfishing the act of luring someone into a relationship through a false identity, has evolved from a fringe deception into a digital epidemic. It’s not always about money or manipulation. Sometimes, it’s about something far more human. Loneliness. Loss. The desperate hunger to be loved again.
I think about Blake. About how easily he smiled for strangers, how his words once made me believe in forever.
And then I think about Dane the way he saidbreathelike it was a promise. The way his voice steadied the shaking in my chest without even trying.
