I typed a greeting.
The reply came almost instantly.
Lis: There's my little bird. How was your day?
I smiled at the screen, already feeling my shoulders drop from my ears.
This was our ritual. Every evening he was online, same questions, same order. Some people might find it tedious, predictable, constraining. I found it essential. The structure held me up when I couldn't hold myself.
Ptichka: Hard. Big job. Got overwhelmed.
I watched the typing indicator appear, disappear, appear again. He was choosing his words carefully. He always chose his words carefully.
Lis: I'm sorry, malyshka. Did you do your recovery protocol?
"Malyshka." Little one. The Russian endearment that he'd started using about three months ago, after I'd told him about the meltdown that had hospitalized me two years prior. He'd asked what helped during overwhelm. I'd told him about Ghost, about the floor, about the five-minute increments of breathing. He'd called it my recovery protocol, and the clinical name somehow made it easier to implement.
Ptichka: Ghost helped. I'm okay now.
Lis: Good girl.
Two words. Just two words, typed on a screen by someone I'd never met, and my whole body relaxed into the armchair. I pulled the blanket higher, tucking it under my chin.
Lis: Now—water?
Ptichka: Yes, Daddy.
I froze.
The word sat there on the screen, irrevocable, transmitted across whatever distance separated us. I hadn't meant to type it. The word had slipped out the way it sometimes did now, after months of dancing around it—hovering at the edge of our conversations, implied but never spoken, acknowledged but never named.
My finger hovered over the delete key.
Too late. He was already typing.
The three dots pulsed. Appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again, longer this time. I couldn't breathe. I'd ruined it. Five months of careful connection, destroyed by three syllables I couldn't take back.
Lis: That's my sweet girl.
I exhaled so hard Ghost raised his head to check on me.
That's my sweet girl. Not a rejection. Not a lecture about boundaries we hadn't formally established. Not an awkward deflection.
Acknowledgment. Acceptance. Continuation.
Lis: Food?
Ptichka: Soup.
My hands were shaking again, but not from overwhelm this time. From something else. Something warmer, more fragile.
Lis: Sleep last night?
Ptichka: Six hours.
Lis: We talked about this. Seven minimum.
I could almost hear his tone through the screen—gentle but firm, the particular combination that made my chest feel too full. He'd started tracking my sleep three months ago, after I'd mentioned my insomnia in passing. Just mentioned it. Hadn't asked for help. But he'd started asking anyway, every night, and somehow that simple question had become part of our ritual.
