Page 97 of Glitched Play

I was sixteen the first time we played together. My headset was cracked on one side, held together with electrical tape because replacing it felt unnecessary when I understood exactly how it was broken. She appeared in the lobby with a username I didn’t recognize, chose the hardest difficulty before I could object, and immediately died within three minutes because neither of us knew the map.

I remember typing:

That was inefficient.

She answered:

We’re not losing. We’re gathering data.

Then she respawned.

Died again.

Typed the same thing.

We’re not losing. We’re gathering data.

I remember smiling.

I remember because it surprised me.

Back then, I didn’t smile much unless one of my brothers forced it out of me through irritation. But this anonymous girl behind a screen had turned failure into strategy with one sentence, and suddenly losing didn’t feel like losing. It felt like research.

Rune did that.

She took the parts of life I found frustrating and reframed them until they made sense.

For years, that was ours.

A shared language.

A world built out of letters, late-night gaming, encrypted messages, and rules designed to keep everything safe.

No names.

No photos.

No locations.

No real voices.

And we never broke the rules. Now I wish we had. She’d be a force in my company and it makes wonder why I never told her about it or asked her to join me. We’d be gaming all night and working together all day.

But we built a system.

It protected us.

Until it became the thing that kept us apart.

My fingers hover over the keyboard.

I type:

I miss talking to you.

The words sit there, small and unacceptable. That simple sentence is too revealing, so I delete them.

Then I type: