I should put the phone down and try to sleep eventhough the Zyrtec made that impossible.
I should do anything except what I was about to do.
For the love of hockey, I knew I shouldn’t—
My thumb found the Message button.
The text field blinked at me, empty and waiting.
PuckingSkylerShaw: Hey
I typed the word before I could think about it.
It was only three letters.
The most basic, boring, low-effort message in the history of human communication.
My finger hovered over Send.
This was stupid.
And he was a fucking dude. Who messaged another guy on Insta? Out of the blue? For no good reason?
Besides, I barely knew the guy. We’d talked twice, maybe three times total. He probably wouldn’t even remember me or he’d think I was weird for sliding into his DMs at one in the morning from a plane somewhere over the Midwest.
But I wanted to talk to him.
I couldn’t explain why. Shit, I didn’t even understand why. I just wanted to.
The want was simple and uncomplicated, sitting in my chest like a fact.
I wanted to know what he was doing.
I wanted to hear about whatever chaos Benji had caused this week.
I wanted to make him laugh the way he’d laughed in that bottle flip video.
I wanted to know him better.
It was all friend stuff, normal stuff, the kind of stuff teammates did all the time.
There was nothing weird about it.
My finger kept hovering.
It’s only a message, I told myself. People send messages. That’s what Instagram was for.Stop being weird,some distant part of me whispered.
But something held me back.
Some instinct I couldn’t name, some hesitation that felt bigger than the moment warranted, demanded I hold back.
Outside the window, the sky was black and endless. The clouds below caught the faint light of the moon, silver-white against the dark. We were suspended between places, between moments, in that strange liminal space that only existed on overnight flights.
Inside the plane, I felt suspended in a different form of amber, unable to think or move or breathe, as my finger made decisions my mind refused to consider.
Three letters.
One tap.
