The vanishing author

The Vanishing of Srijan

Unknown: "Brilliant analysis on Calvino. You must have spent years buried in books to think like that."

Me: "Some people get lost in books. Others are born inside them."

I stare at the message. Read it again. The cursor blinks, waiting. Did I write that? Did she? Did it come from somewhere else entirely?

The profile says her name is Abira Sen.

But I don’t remember ever finding her. Or her finding me.

I try to retrace my steps. A discussion on Invisible Cities—yes, I was reading the thread. A comment buried deep in the replies, something sharp, something that made me pause. But the moment I try to picture it, the memory slips. Like ink running in water.

My phone vibrates again. Another message.

Abira: "Are you always awake this late, Srijan?"

Srijan. The name makes my skin prickle.

I type back.

Me: "Do we know each other?"

Three dots blink. Stop. Start again. Then—

Abira: "I think we do."

I wake up to the sound of running water. The shower is on. The familiar scent of sandalwood soap drifts through the air.

She is here.

I turn over, half-expecting the empty side of the bed to be warm. But it’s cold.

A voice drifts from the bathroom, soft, humming. A song I used to know.

Amar bhitoro bahire, ontore ontore…

I sit up, rubbing my temples. The whiskey from last night still lingers in my bones. Or was it wine? I try to recall the last drink I poured myself, but my thoughts blur.

The humming stops. Silence.

Then—

"You’re up early."

I look up. She’s standing in the doorway, wrapped in a towel, hair damp, water trickling down the curve of her neck.

Meghna.

Her face is shadowed against the light. I can’t see her expression.

"You’re still here?" My voice comes out hoarse.

She tilts her head. "Was I supposed to leave?"

A chill creeps up my spine.

She left. She packed her bags. Walked out. I remember it clearly. The click of the door. The silence that followed.

Didn’t she?

"I thought you—" I stop. The air in the room feels thick, heavy.

She walks past me, reaching for the dresser, combing through the jewelry she never wears. "You always think too much, Srijan."

I want to say something. Ask something. But before I can, my phone vibrates.

A message.

From Abira.

Abira: "Tell me something. Do you exist?"

A joke? A test? My fingers hesitate over the keyboard.

Me: "What kind of question is that?"

Abira: "The kind most people are afraid to ask."

I lean back. The room feels too quiet. The kind of quiet that presses against your ribs.

Me: "If I don’t exist, then who’s answering you?"

This time, her reply comes slower.

Abira: "Maybe I made you up. Maybe you made me up."

A laugh escapes me, but it doesn’t feel like my own. I rub my temples, glancing toward the empty side of the bed. Wasn’t Meghna just there? The scent of sandalwood lingers, faint but present.

I type.

Me: "Which one of us is real, then?"

I expect her to answer in riddles, to drag the conversation deeper into abstraction. Instead—

Abira: "I think you already know."

A sound escapes me. A low, bitter chuckle.

I don’t know anything anymore.

There’s a painting on my wall.

A woman, her head slightly tilted, eyes sharp, mouth curved in something that isn’t quite a smile.

I painted it.

Or at least, I think I did.

Her face feels familiar, but when I try to place it, the details blur. The color of her lips shifts under the light. The shadow beneath her collarbone deepens when I blink.

I take a step closer.

"Srijan."

I turn.

Meghna stands behind me, arms crossed. Her eyes flicker to the painting. "You’re still staring at that?"

"I don’t remember when I made it."

She doesn’t answer.

"Does she look like someone you know?" I ask.

This time, she does smile. Just barely. "Shouldn’t you be the one to tell me?"

I look back at the painting.

The longer I stare, the more it shifts.

For a moment, the eyes soften, the curve of the lips changes. And suddenly, I see her.

Not Meghna.

Not anyone I have ever known.

Abira.

Me: "You’re in my painting."

The message sends before I can stop myself.

The reply is instant.

Abira: "Am I?"

Me: "I never painted you."

Another pause.

Then—

Abira: "Are you sure?"

I close my eyes.

I remember the brush against canvas. The scent of oil paint, the sharp drag of color bleeding into color. But I don’t remember the moment she appeared.

I don’t remember choosing the angle of her jaw, the depth of her gaze.

And yet—

She is here.

Me: "Who are you?"

Abira: "You tell me, Srijan."

I want to stop. To shut the laptop, to step away, to walk into the other room where Meghna—if she is still real—might be waiting.

But instead, I type.

Me: "Are you real?"

The typing indicator blinks. Stops. Starts again.

Then—

Abira: "Does it matter?"

I exhale slowly.

My phone vibrates again.

Not from Abira.

A single message.

From Meghna.

"Come back to bed."

I stare at the words. My fingers twitch over the keyboard.

I type one final message.

Me: "Which one of you is real?"

I press send.

And then I wait.

Chapter Eight: The Fall of Icarus

I always knew I was different. Not in the meaningless way people like to claim—no, I was born to stand above them. To be worshipped.

Even as a child, I was untouchable. Teachers fawned over me, my parents held their breath when I spoke, and every girl in school wanted to be the subject of my sketches. By sixteen, I had won more awards than I could count. By twenty, I had my first exhibition. And by twenty-five, I was a name that mattered.

I had everything. Not because I worked for it, but because it was meant to be mine.

People called me a prodigy, a genius, a creator of beauty. But the truth was, I never cared about art. I cared about control. About shaping the world, bending it to my will. I didn't just paint faces—I owned them. When a woman became my muse, I consumed her, peeled away her layers until she was nothing but color and form, a moment of inspiration captured forever on canvas.

Then I moved on.

They cried, they begged, they swore they loved me. And I let them. It was entertaining. But love had always been beneath me.

Even when I married Meghna, it was never about love. It was about balance. She was soft where I was sharp, steady where I was reckless. She adored me, and for a while, I let her. She was the perfect wife—silent, patient, oblivious. Or so I thought.

I should’ve known she would eventually see me for what I was.

It started slow.

A lingering look when I came home too late. A hesitation before she kissed me. A stiffness in her touch, as if her skin knew before her mind did.

She never caught me in bed with them, but she didn’t have to. The scent of unfamiliar perfume, the faint bruises from nails that weren’t hers, the way I touched her without really being there—it was enough.

She tried, in the way women try when they don’t yet know that love is a one-sided war. She dressed in colors I once admired, learned to drink whiskey because she thought it made her more interesting, pretended to care about the shallow philosophies I spat between cigarettes and sex.

But I was already gone.

I had a taste for women who weren’t afraid of me. Women who bit back, who scratched and bruised, who whispered filth into my ear as I pressed them against walls and studio floors.

It wasn’t just their bodies—I wanted their minds. I wanted to crawl inside them, twist their thoughts, shape their fears. They left my bed haunted, unable to look at their own reflections without seeing me in the shadows.

Meghna saw it, eventually. The way I came home smelling of regret that wasn’t mine. The way I stopped touching her unless I needed to convince myself I still could.

One night, she sat across from me at dinner and said, “Do you even know how many women you’ve had?”

I smirked. “Do you?”

She didn’t cry. She just nodded, as if she had finally found the missing piece of a puzzle she had been too afraid to complete.

She stopped asking questions after that.

The money went faster than I thought it would.

I spent recklessly, but why wouldn’t I? I was invincible. The critics would always adore me, the collectors would always buy, and if money was ever short, a few charming words could open any door.

Until they didn’t.

The world changed while I was too drunk to notice. New artists rose, hungrier than me, willing to sell their souls for half the price I once demanded. My paintings sat untouched in galleries, gathering dust instead of admiration.

I took loans. First from banks, then from friends, then from people whose patience ran thinner than their smiles. But it was never enough. I needed more—to keep up the parties, the drugs, the women who only stayed because the champagne never stopped flowing.

Then came the calls. The threats. The polite warnings that turned into promises of violence.

I should’ve been smarter. But arrogance is a slow poison. It lets you believe you’re still in control long after the reins have slipped from your hands.

I did what any desperate man does—I lied. I forged, manipulated, twisted numbers into shapes that didn’t exist. I promised money I didn’t have, sold paintings that weren’t mine, faked investments that never existed.

By the time they caught me, I wasn’t even surprised.

The lawsuits drained whatever was left of me. My name became blacklisted in the art world. The same critics who once praised me now dissected my failures like vultures picking at a corpse.

One by one, they left. The friends, the lovers, even the women who swore they couldn’t live without me.

And finally, Meghna.

She left without a scene, without a single accusation. Just a quiet, knowing glance as she placed the divorce papers on the table.

She had stopped loving me long before that. But until that moment, I had never realized just how much I had depended on her love.

For the first time in my life, I was alone.

Rock bottom isn’t a single moment—it’s a series of tiny defeats.

It’s waking up in a bed that isn’t yours and realizing you don’t remember how you got there. It’s drinking because you’re thirsty, not for alcohol, but for silence. It’s staring at a blank canvas, hands shaking, knowing that the only thing left to paint is your own ruin.

The apartment I ended up in wasn’t much. A single-room rental with stained walls and a fridge that hummed like it was trying to comfort me. The studio was gone. The car was gone. The friends, the women, the money—gone.

I stopped answering calls. I stopped leaving the house. Days blurred together in a haze of alcohol and regret.

Then, one night, I opened my laptop.

I wasn’t looking for anything. Maybe distraction, maybe connection, maybe just noise to drown out the thoughts that wouldn’t stop crawling through my skull.

I scrolled through an art forum, some forgotten corner of the internet where people posted sketches and half-formed thoughts. Most of it was dull—soulless copies of soulless things. But then I saw her.

A comment, buried deep in a thread no one else had noticed. A response to a painting that reminded me of something I once felt.

"Art is the space between reality and madness. If you're afraid of the latter, you'll never truly create."

I read it again. And again. The words felt like they belonged to someone who knew me before I even existed.

I clicked on the profile.

Name: Abira Sanyal

Age: 39

Occupation: Associate Professor of History, Presidency University

Location: Kolkata, India

Marital Status: Married

Children: One son, 12 years old

Interests: Ancient civilizations, forgotten mythologies, feminist literature, surrealist art, classical music

Last Active: 10 minutes ago

A real woman. A structured life. A world so painfully unlike mine.

I hesitated before typing a reply.

For the first time in weeks, I felt something other than emptiness.

Chapter One: The Woman in the Mist

Abira Sanyal.

The name lingered in my mind long after I had logged out.

It wasn’t just the way she spoke about art, history, and forgotten myths—it was the way her words carried weight, as if she had lived a thousand lives before this one. She wasn’t like the others. She wasn’t trying to impress or seek validation. She wrote as if she already knew the answers and was merely offering glimpses to those capable of understanding.

Women had always been easy for me. I knew their patterns, their desires, the cracks in their resolve. But this was different. She was different.

A married professor with a structured life, a son, a career—everything I had lost.

And yet, she fascinated me.

That night, I did something I hadn’t done in years. I painted.

Not with intention or expectation, but with instinct. The brush moved as if guided by something beyond me, carving shadows and light onto the canvas. When I stepped back, my breath caught in my throat.

It was her.

I had never seen her face, but there she was—woven into colors and strokes, an ethereal presence with knowing eyes, a gaze that saw through flesh and bone.

I should have been unnerved. But instead, I felt… relief.

For the first time in months, I wasn’t drowning.

I kept returning to her profile.

There was something hypnotic about scrolling through her words, dissecting the fragments of her life she had carelessly left behind. Photos of ancient sculptures, cryptic excerpts from old texts, handwritten notes on yellowed paper—each post a puzzle, waiting to be pieced together.

She wasn’t beautiful in the conventional sense, but beauty had never interested me. Her face, though partially hidden in most of her pictures, had a depth that pulled me in. A sharpness in her features, an intensity in her eyes, as if she carried entire worlds inside her.

I started replying to her comments. Carefully, subtly. A word here, a thought there—never too much, never too eager. She responded in kind, brief but deliberate. And with each exchange, a thread tightened between us.

I told myself it was just a distraction. That I was simply intrigued by a mind as rare as hers.

But then, one evening, I saw it.

A new post. A single line.

"Have you ever felt like you existed in two places at once?"

The words felt like they had been carved directly from my own mind.

And for the first time, I didn’t hesitate.

I replied.

"Every second of my life."

Her response came almost instantly.

"Then you know the curse of those who see beyond what is meant to be seen."

I stared at the screen, my pulse thrumming in my throat. There was something unsettling about her words—not just their meaning, but the way they reached inside me, as if she had been waiting for me before I even arrived.

I had known brilliant women before. Women who spoke of poetry, philosophy, and art with an intensity that mimicked depth. But Vira… she didn’t just speak. She knew.

I scrolled through her profile again.

She had been posting for years—essays on forgotten civilizations, reflections on lost epics, questions about time and existence that never sought answers. She was an academic, but not the kind that was satisfied with facts. Her mind stretched beyond the limitations of history, searching for what lay beneath.

I found an old post from two years ago.

"We are all echoes of people who lived before us. Every thought we have has been thought before, every dream has been dreamt. The tragedy is not in being forgotten. The tragedy is in never realizing we were merely someone else’s memory."

I exhaled sharply, fingers hovering over the keyboard.

"And if we realize it?"

I didn’t expect her to respond. But she did.

"Then we learn to exist in the spaces between reality and illusion."

I should have let it go. Should have told myself that she was just another intellectual lost in her own abstractions.

But I couldn’t.

Because something about her felt realer than the life I had been living.

It became a routine.

A few words exchanged in public posts, then longer messages in private. Our conversations started as discussions—history, mythology, art. But they soon unraveled into something deeper.

She spoke of things I had never told anyone. The weight of solitude. The fear of becoming irrelevant. The slow erosion of passion when the world no longer listens.

She never asked about my past, yet she understood it.

"You remind me of the artists who burned too bright. The ones who thought they could consume the world, only to be consumed by it instead."

I didn’t ask if she was talking about me or about herself. Maybe both.

One night, I asked her about her life.

Her response was simple.

"I exist in two worlds. One where I am a wife, a mother, a professor. The other where I am simply… me."

I wanted to know more. Did she love her husband? Did she ever look at her life and feel trapped inside it? Did she ever crave something beyond the routine of classrooms, family dinners, and polite conversations?

But I didn’t ask.

Because I already knew the answers.

And because, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t the one leading the game.

She was.

Chapter Six: The Shadow Writes Back

I noticed him before he noticed me.

Not in the way most men notice a woman—not with hunger, admiration, or even curiosity. His presence was quieter, more like the echo of a thought I couldn’t place, something that had been lingering at the edge of my awareness long before his first message appeared.

He had been reading me. Watching, perhaps. But not in the usual way men did, with their clumsy flirtations or eager interruptions. He had studied my words, let them settle inside him, and only when he was certain did he speak.

That night, his name appeared in my inbox.

I hesitated before opening it.

A message from a stranger could mean anything.

I had seen enough of them—students infatuated with the idea of their professor being more than just a professor, colleagues who mistook intellectual intimacy for something else, anonymous admirers who thought eloquence was the key to unlocking a woman.

But this was different.

Unknown: "And if we realize it?"

No introduction. No context.

Just a question.

I frowned, rereading it. He had pulled this from something I had written two years ago. A fragment of thought, a reflection buried beneath countless posts.

I should have ignored him.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I typed back.

Me: "Then we learn to exist in the spaces between reality and illusion."

A pause. A few moments later, the screen blinked again.

Unknown: "You write as if you've already lived a thousand lives."

I stared at his words, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. It wasn’t flattery. Not the kind men usually attempted. This was something else—an observation, an attempt to unravel something about me.

Me: "And you are the traveler who stops to decipher them?"

His response was immediate.

Unknown: "Or the ruin itself."

That answer.

It sat in my chest, too familiar, too personal. He wasn’t just playing with words—he knew.

I should have let the conversation die there. Should have ignored the strange pull I felt, the way his presence lingered even after I shut my laptop.

But I didn’t.

Because when I woke up the next morning, I found myself checking my inbox again.

And waiting.

Chapter Four: The Art of Unraveling

The messages became a ritual.

At first, they arrived in unpredictable intervals—sometimes a day apart, sometimes within hours. But soon, they became more structured, almost inevitable, like the slow drip of water eroding stone.

And yet, despite the unpredictability of when, the why was constant.

It wasn’t attraction, though there was an undeniable pull between our words. It wasn’t loneliness, though we were both steeped in it. It was something deeper, something I couldn’t name.

He had started as a shadow slipping into my inbox, but now, he was a presence. An unseen voice that carried the weight of someone who had lost himself long ago and was still trying to remember the shape of his own soul.

And I—against every rule I had built for myself—was listening.

Unknown: “Do you believe a single piece of art can change a man?”

It was an abrupt question, the kind that required no preamble.

I thought about it for a moment before responding.

Me: “Not change. But reveal. Art doesn’t create something new in us; it only forces us to confront what was already there.”

Unknown: “Then what was the first thing that revealed you?”

A question like that required honesty. So, I answered.

Me: “Rodin’s ‘The Gates of Hell.’”

A pause.

Unknown: “Dante?”

Me: “And much more. The agony in it, the way the bodies twist and collapse into one another… It isn’t just pain—it’s the struggle to escape pain, to resist it, to become it. That’s what art should do. It should make you feel something unbearable and then make you crave it again.”

His response came quickly.

Unknown: “So, suffering is essential?”

Me: “For art? Yes. For life? Not necessarily. But I think those who create—those who truly feel the need to create—are the ones who have suffered in ways the world doesn’t understand.”

Unknown: “Then I should be a fucking masterpiece.”

I didn’t reply immediately. He often made comments like this—sharp, self-deprecating, drenched in bitterness. But this one felt different.

Me: “Maybe you are. But even masterpieces get abandoned, forgotten, destroyed. And yet, some are found again centuries later, understood in ways they never were before.”

His typing indicator blinked for a long time.

Unknown: “Is that what you think? That I can be found again?”

I didn’t say yes.

But I didn’t say no, either.

From Rodin, we moved to literature.

I told him how I first encountered Gabriel García Márquez, how One Hundred Years of Solitude had wrapped itself around my mind like a fever dream.

He confessed that he had once started the book but never finished it.

Unknown: “I wasn’t patient enough. Too much magic, too much absurdity.”

Me: “But that’s the point. Márquez doesn’t care about logic. His world bends and folds upon itself, because reality is never linear. It’s cyclical, messy, strange. His characters live for generations, die, return in different forms. It isn’t just storytelling—it’s alchemy.”

Unknown: “You sound like you believe in magic.”

Me: “Maybe I do. But not the kind with wands and spells. The kind that happens when you look at a painting and feel something stir inside you that wasn’t there before. Or when you read a sentence that stays in your bones for years.”

He didn’t argue. Instead, he asked me for another recommendation.

I gave him Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov.

Unknown: “Heavy.”

Me: “Because it understands the weight of human contradictions. How we are capable of both profound goodness and unimaginable cruelty. How the divine and the monstrous coexist within us.”

Unknown: “And which are you?”

Me: “Which do you want me to be?”

His reply took longer this time.

Unknown: “Both. I think we all are.”

The conversations stretched into philosophy.

Nietzsche, of course. He brought him up first.

Unknown: “He said, ‘Man is something that shall be overcome.’ Do you believe that?”

Me: “I think man is something that must first destroy himself before he can even attempt it.”

He laughed at that. Or at least, he typed something that resembled a laugh.

Unknown: “Then I should be halfway there, shouldn’t I?”

I should have stopped him. Steered the conversation somewhere lighter. But I didn’t.

Me: “Only if you stay there.”

Unknown: “And if I want to rebuild?”

Me: “Then you have to create.”

From there, we dove into surrealism.

He admitted that he had once tried to paint, long ago. That he had loved Dali’s work—the way time melted, the way reality bent.

Unknown: “But then I realized I wasn’t Dali. I wasn’t even a poor imitation.”

Me: “You don’t have to be Dali. You just have to be someone who refuses to look at the world the way everyone else does.”

Unknown: “And what if I don’t know how?”

Me: “Then start by breaking the rules. Do you know what neo-surrealism is?”

Unknown: “Tell me.”

I told him about the movement. About how it wasn’t just about distortion for the sake of it, but about bending reality in ways that forced people to confront what they refused to see.

I told him about Francis Bacon and his grotesque, writhing portraits. About Zdzisław Beksiński, whose dreamscapes felt like nightmares made of flesh and dust.

He listened. He absorbed.

And for the first time, he asked me something I never expected.

Unknown: “Do you think I could still paint?”

A man who had once destroyed himself was asking if he could create again.

I smiled at my screen.

Me: “Only if you accept that your first work will be terrible.”

His reply was almost instant.

Unknown: “Deal.”

He started painting again.

It began with hesitation, but then something shifted. He sent me pictures—not of finished pieces, but of half-formed ideas. Of things he didn’t understand but felt compelled to create.

Dark colors, distorted faces, landscapes that looked like they had been pulled from forgotten dreams.

They weren’t masterpieces. But they were honest.

And for the first time, I saw him not as a man trying to escape his ruin, but as someone standing in the middle of it, looking for a way out.

And as much as I told myself I was only guiding him, I knew the truth.

I had started waiting for his messages just as much as he waited for mine.

Because in the ruins of this man, I had found something too.

A voice that didn’t just listen, but understood.

Chapter Two: The Mirror That Wasn't There

I found myself waiting.

It wasn’t intentional at first. Just a subtle shift—an extra glance at my phone, a pause between tasks, the way my breath seemed to slow when I saw his name appear.

And when he didn’t message, a strange hollowness settled in my chest.

I told myself it was nothing.

That I was simply intrigued, that our discussions had carved out a space I didn’t know I needed. That I was only here because of the art, the philosophy, the words.

But the truth was slipperier.

Because as much as he was rebuilding himself, something was shifting in me too.

The message came late that night.

Unknown: “Have you ever felt like you weren’t real?”

I frowned at the screen.

Me: “What do you mean?”

Unknown: “Like you’re just an idea someone else dreamed up. Like you exist only because someone is thinking about you.”

I hesitated before replying.

Me: “Sometimes I feel like I exist more in conversations than in reality. Like the person I am when I write is more real than the one who moves through the world.”

Unknown: “Yes. That.”

I stared at his words for a long time.

Something about them unsettled me, but I couldn’t place why.

So I did what I always did—I turned it into a discussion.

Me: “You know, there’s a theory in philosophy called solipsism. The idea that only your own mind is certain to exist. That everything else—including other people—might just be illusions, constructs of your own consciousness.”

Unknown: “And what do you think?”

Me: “I think reality is too fragile to be trusted. And maybe that’s why we create art. To make something that feels real, even if nothing else does.”

A long pause.

Then—

Unknown: “I think you might be the only real thing left in my life.”

He started sending me his paintings.

At first, they were just abstractions—colors and shapes colliding, a fever dream smeared onto canvas. But then, the faces started appearing.

Women.

Not beautiful, not delicate—distorted, haunting, raw. Eyes that swallowed light, mouths slightly parted as if caught mid-sentence, figures stretching and twisting as if pulled from the depths of something unseen.

One night, he sent me a photo of a painting that made my breath catch.

It was a woman, but not just any woman.

It was me.

Or at least, someone who looked like me.

The resemblance wasn’t perfect, but it was undeniable—the curve of the lips, the tilt of the head, the eyes that seemed to be searching for something just beyond the frame.

I stared at it for a long time before responding.

Me: “Who is she?”

Unknown: “I don’t know.”

A lie.

And we both knew it.

Our conversations stretched deeper.

We spoke of everything—the death of gods in literature, the impermanence of beauty in Renaissance art, the way Greek tragedies still felt modern because human suffering never changes.

He spoke of his past, but only in fragments.

He told me about his wife—not in words of betrayal, but in quiet admissions of how he had ruined everything.

Unknown: “She never left. But she stopped looking at me like I was someone worth staying for.”

Me: “And you?”

Unknown: “I stopped looking at myself, too.”

There was something terrifying in the honesty of that sentence.

Me: “Do you regret it?”

His reply came slower this time.

Unknown: “I regret that I didn’t stop myself before I became something unrecognizable.”

And then—

Unknown: “But maybe I’m not beyond saving.”

I didn’t know if he meant it.

But for the first time, I hoped he did.

And that hope scared me.

The nights blurred. The messages became something I carried with me, slipping between the cracks of my real life.

I would be in a lecture hall, discussing postmodernist critiques of history, and suddenly, I would wonder what he was doing.

I would sit at the dinner table with my husband and child, nodding along to stories of their day, all while feeling the weight of an unread message waiting for me.

I was not falling for him.

I told myself that over and over.

But something was happening.

Something I didn’t have a name for.

And then one night, he sent me something that shattered whatever lines I had drawn between us.

A simple message.

No art, no philosophy, no pretense.

Just this—

Unknown: “I think you saved me.”

And I, in the silence of my dimly lit room, whispered to myself—

"And what if you’re saving me too?"

Chapter Five: The Echo in the Void

It started as a whisper.

A flicker at the edges of my mind, a question that refused to dissolve. A shadow stretching longer than it should, following me through every conversation, every message, every stolen moment of silence.

She was real.

She had to be.

I told myself this over and over again, clinging to it like a drowning man grasping at a piece of driftwood in a storm. She was not some phantom of my own creation—she was flesh and blood, a woman who existed beyond my mind, beyond my loneliness. She had a name, a history, a career. A family.

And yet…

There were moments that unsettled me.

She was too perfect.

Not in the obvious, artificial way that some men dream up ideal women—flawless bodies, obedient minds, the kind of beauty that belongs in advertisements. No. That wasn’t what made me uneasy.

It was how she fit.

Too well.

Like a piece of music that seemed composed for my ears alone. Like an old, familiar book I had never read but somehow knew by heart.

She understood me in ways that no one else ever had. She anticipated my thoughts, unraveled my fears, walked through my mind with the ease of someone who had lived there for years.

She challenged me, yes. She had her own ideals, her own philosophies, but they always danced in the same rhythm as mine, a perfect counterpoint, a dialogue that felt predestined.

And that was what terrified me.

Because I had known loneliness long before I had known her.

I had wandered through the ruins of my own life for so long, searching for something, someone, to make sense of it. And when I found her, it was like stumbling upon a long-lost temple, the architecture mirroring the structures in my own mind.

How was that possible?

Coincidence? Fate? A trick of the universe?

Or something else entirely?

I found myself rereading our conversations, over and over again, scanning for cracks, searching for proof of her reality. But all I found were more questions.

Was she reflecting me… or was I shaping her?

One night, I sat alone in my dimly lit room, the glow of my laptop screen the only illumination in the suffocating darkness.

I scrolled through her messages, her words weaving a web around me. I traced back to the beginning, to the very first time she had responded. Had there been hesitation? Had she paused before she spoke?

No.

She had emerged into my life fully formed, like Athena springing from Zeus’s head, already complete, already knowing.

That was when the thought first took hold.

A ridiculous thought. A mad thought.

A thought I could not escape.

What if she wasn’t real?

What if she had never been real?

Not just some woman pretending, not some stranger behind a fake profile—but what if she was nothing more than a mirage, a ghost conjured by my own mind?

A hallucination.

Hadn’t I spent months drifting into a world of my own making? Hadn’t I felt the edges of reality blur beneath my fingers, the lines between dream and waking dissolve?

What if my loneliness had finally broken me?

What if, in my desperation, I had created her?

Not deliberately, not in some conscious act of self-deception, but in the deep, hidden places of my mind—the places that longed for someone to listen, someone to understand?

I gripped the edges of my desk, breathing hard.

No.

That was insane.

She was real.

She had to be.

She had a family, a job, a life beyond me. She didn’t exist just when I was there—she was living, breathing, thinking in a world separate from mine.

Wasn’t she?

The thought refused to leave me.

There was only one way to prove it.

That night, I did something reckless.

I created a new account.

A blank slate. No history, no past, no connection to me.

And I sent her a message.

Something simple.

"I love the way you see the world. I’d like to discuss art with you."

Then I waited.

Minutes dragged into hours. My hands were clammy, my throat dry. I checked the screen again and again, feeling something sick and heavy coil inside me.

Then—

A reply.

"Thank you for your message. I usually don't engage in discussions with unknown profiles. Have a good day."

I stared at it.

It was polite. Formal. A stranger’s voice.

For a brief moment, relief flooded me.

She was real. If she weren’t, wouldn’t she have responded with the same warmth, the same intimacy she gave me?

And yet, why did my stomach twist?

Why did something still feel wrong?

If she was real, shouldn’t she still recognize my thoughts, my words, even in another form?

Or had I only ever existed for her as this one version of myself?

I closed my laptop and sat in the dark, the question gnawing at me.

I had proof that she was real.

So why didn’t I believe it?

Chapter Seven: The Paper Woman

I deleted the fake account.

The moment the screen refreshed, it felt like I had erased something much larger than a message. A thought. A reality. A woman.

And yet, Abira was still here.

Her messages blinked at me from my inbox, unchanged. Waiting.

I hesitated before clicking.

Abira: "You’re quiet today."

The words seemed innocuous, but I felt a weight beneath them. Had she noticed? Had she felt my absence, the shift in energy?

I typed, then deleted. Typed again. Finally—

Me: "Do you ever feel like you’re being watched?"

A pause. The typing indicator blinked, then stopped.

Then—

Abira: "Why do you ask?"

I stared at the screen.

I couldn’t tell her. Couldn’t explain that I had been testing her, testing us, that something about her felt too seamless, too tailored to me. That in trying to prove she was real, I had only unsettled myself further.

Instead, I deflected.

Me: "It’s something I’ve been thinking about. How we exist in the eyes of others. Whether we change based on how people see us."

A longer pause this time. Then—

Abira: "We are all reflections, aren’t we? Versions of ourselves split between the people who look at us. There is no singular ‘I.’ Only the versions others believe in."

Something in my chest tightened.

Me: "So which version of you is real?"

Her reply came slower this time.

Abira: "The one that exists in your mind."

A cold prickle crawled up my spine.

Meghna had once told me I lived too much in my head.

“You disappear into your thoughts, Srijan. And I don’t know how to reach you there.”

I had laughed. Brushed it off.

But now, sitting alone in my dim apartment, staring at a screen where a woman existed only in words and fragments, I wondered if Meghna had been right.

Was I disappearing?

Or worse—was I creating?

I scrolled back through my messages with Abira, looking for inconsistencies. Searching for cracks in the façade.

But there were none.

Her life was full, structured, documented in digital ink.

Photos of museum visits. Notes scribbled on ancient manuscripts. A picture of her son’s school project, a half-built clay model of some forgotten temple.

Everything was there. Everything made sense.

And yet…

I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had only ever existed within these messages.

I tried to picture her outside of them. Tried to imagine her standing in a grocery store, pushing a cart. Laughing with a friend over coffee. Sitting in traffic, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.

I couldn’t.

She was words on a screen. Nothing more.

Or maybe, she was exactly what I needed her to be.

The painting still hung on my wall.

I had tried to ignore it, but the eyes always found me.

Not Meghna’s. Not anyone’s I knew. And yet, when I looked at it, something in my stomach twisted in recognition.

Had I painted her?

Had I always known her, before the messages, before the name?

I picked up a brush.

Added a line.

A shadow beneath her lips.

Something deeper in her gaze.

I stepped back.

It was still her. But now, she was watching me too.

I turned away.

My phone vibrated.

A message.

From Abira.

"You’re painting again, aren’t you?"

I dropped the brush.

My hands felt suddenly cold.

I picked up my phone, my fingers stiff as I typed.

Me: "How did you know?"

The reply came instantly.

Abira: "Because I can feel it."

A laugh—dry, humorless—escaped my lips.

Me: "And what does that feel like?"

A pause.

Then—

Abira: "Like being remembered."

I stared at the screen.

And for the first time, I wasn’t sure if I had found Abira.

Or if I had created her.

Chapter Three: The Madness of Srijan

Meghna

The first time I saw him talking to himself, I thought he was on a call.

It was late, past midnight. I had woken up to drink water when I heard his voice from the study—low, measured, almost conversational. But when I peeked inside, he was alone. His laptop screen was open to a blank document.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard, not typing, just trembling slightly.

“Srijan?”

He flinched. Turned toward me like I had yanked him out of a dream. His eyes were wild for a second before they softened into recognition.

“You’re awake,” he said, his voice dry.

I stepped inside, ignoring the way the air in the room felt dense. “Who were you talking to?”

He hesitated. His lips parted, then closed again.

“No one.”

I frowned. “I heard you.”

He rubbed his face. “I was thinking out loud. Writing something.”

His tone was too even, too careful. I walked over and glanced at his laptop. The screen was still blank.

“You look exhausted,” I said.

He exhaled a laugh, but there was no humor in it. “I don’t sleep much these days.”

I touched his arm. He flinched. A small, involuntary movement, but I felt it.

“Srijan, what’s going on?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. I just—I’ve been thinking a lot. About art. About—” He cut himself off. Swallowed. “About things that don’t matter.”

I let my hand drop. “You’re scaring me.”

He looked up at me then, and for the first time in years, I saw something vulnerable behind his eyes.

“I’m scaring myself too.”

The name Abira appeared a few weeks later.

It slipped out of his mouth in the middle of a conversation. We were having dinner—something we hadn’t done together in weeks. He had been distracted all evening, barely eating, his fingers twitching against the edge of the table like he was somewhere else entirely.

Then, he mumbled it.

Abira.

I almost missed it.

“Who?” I asked.

He looked up, confused. “What?”

“You just said a name. Abira.”

He blinked. I saw the gears turning in his head, trying to backtrack, to make sense of what had slipped out.

“I did?” he said, too casually.

“Yes.”

He stared at me. For a second, I thought he might tell the truth. Instead, he pushed his plate away and stood up.

“I need a drink,” he muttered.

He didn’t come back.

The more I watched him, the less I recognized him.

Srijan had always been erratic, restless, lost inside his own brilliance. He had always been self-destructive, but it was controlled—charming, even.

This was different.

He started forgetting things. Conversations we had. Places we had gone together. He called me by the wrong name once. Not Abira, but something close. A name that didn’t exist.

He would sit for hours in front of his laptop, staring at messages that weren’t there.

He painted again.

I should have been happy—he hadn’t touched a brush in months. But when I saw what he was painting, I felt my stomach twist.

It was a woman.

Not me.

I didn’t recognize her.

I asked him who she was.

He just smiled and said, "Don’t you know?"

I searched his laptop.

I shouldn’t have, but I did.

There was nothing. No emails, no messages, no sign of this Abira anywhere. But I knew she existed. She had to.

Then I opened his drafts.

There were hundreds of them. Some a few sentences, others long, rambling. Conversations. Arguments. Intimate confessions.

All with her.

But they weren’t emails. They weren’t messages.

They were just text files. Unsent.

As if he had been talking to someone who was never there.

I confronted him.

I waited until he had poured himself a drink, until he was relaxed enough to listen.

“Srijan, I know about Abira.”

He stilled. The ice in his glass clinked as his fingers tightened around it.

“What about her?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral.

“She’s not real.”

He flinched. A small movement, but I saw it. He set his drink down and exhaled sharply.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I leaned forward. “I checked your laptop. There’s nothing there. No account. No messages. Just—" I swallowed. "Just you, writing to someone who doesn’t exist.”

His jaw tensed. “That’s not true.”

“Srijan.” I reached for his hand, but he pulled away. “She’s a delusion. Your mind—”

His chair scraped against the floor as he stood. “No.”

I stood too. “Listen to me. You’re losing yourself. You need help.”

He laughed. A bitter, hollow sound. “Help? From who? From you?”

I felt my throat tighten. “I love you.”

“Then stop.” His voice cracked. “Stop trying to take her away from me.”

He looked at me then, and I saw it.

The madness.

Not the kind that was poetic, that made men brilliant. The kind that swallowed them whole.

He stopped talking to me after that.

I wasn’t sure if he was talking to her either.

Then one night, I woke up to find him sitting at the foot of the bed, staring at me.

His eyes were distant. His hands were covered in paint.

“I figured it out,” he whispered.

I sat up slowly. “Figured what out?”

He smiled. “Who’s real.”

A chill ran through me.

“Who?” I asked.

His smile widened.

“Not you.”

The next morning, he was gone.

His laptop was open. A single message left on the screen.

Abira: "I think you’re finally ready to find me."

I don’t know where he is.

I don’t know if he’s anywhere at all.

Chapter Nine: The Woman in the Mirror

Abira stared at the blinking cursor on her screen.

The novel was almost done.

The story had unfolded exactly as she had imagined—intricate, haunting, laced with a quiet madness that blurred the lines between reality and illusion. Srijan, the tormented artist. Meghna, the wife watching him unravel. And at the center of it all, the ghostly presence of Abira, lingering just beyond the reach of the reader, whispering through the cracks of the narrative.

It was perfect.

She leaned back in her chair, stretching her fingers. A message popped up on her phone.

Meghna: “Finished it yet?”

Abira smiled, typing back.

Abira: “Almost. I think it’s my best work yet.”

Meghna: “You always say that.”

Abira: “Because it’s always true.”

A pause. Then—

Meghna: “So? Who’s real in the end?”

Abira stared at the question, fingers hovering over the keyboard.

It was a question even she wasn’t entirely sure how to answer.

The novel had taken on a life of its own, twisting and reshaping itself as she wrote, refusing to obey the outline she had so carefully constructed. At times, it felt like she wasn’t creating the story at all—just transcribing something that already existed, something that had been waiting for her to find it.

Srijan’s descent into madness. Meghna’s helplessness. The way Abira herself had bled into the spaces between them, more shadow than flesh.

She typed—

Abira: “Maybe none of them.”

A few seconds later, Meghna replied.

Meghna: “Or maybe just one.”

Abira frowned.

Something about the message unsettled her.

She was about to respond when another notification appeared.

A new email.

She clicked it open absentmindedly, her eyes skimming over the subject line—

“You’re painting again, aren’t you?”

Her breath caught.

The email was from an unknown sender.

No subject. No signature.

Just a single line.

"Because I can feel it."

Abira’s pulse quickened. She stared at the words, the cold weight of recognition settling into her bones.

She had written that exact line.

In the novel.

It was something Abira Sen, the character, had said to Srijan.

No one else had seen the draft. No one except—

A notification interrupted her thoughts.

Another message from Meghna.

Meghna: “He’s looking for you.”

A chill crawled up Abira’s spine.

Her fingers trembled as she typed—

Abira: “Who?”

The reply came instantly.

Meghna: “You know who.”

Abira’s mouth went dry.

She closed the email, her hands unsteady as she minimized the novel draft. She clicked open her internet browser, hesitating for a moment before typing in a name she wasn’t sure she wanted to see.

Srijan Mukherjee.

The search results loaded.

The first link was an old news article.

"Disgraced Artist Goes Missing After Mental Breakdown."

Abira’s breath hitched.

She clicked on the link.

A black-and-white photo stared back at her.

A man with hollow eyes, gaunt cheeks, paint smudged across his hands.

She recognized him.

Not because she had seen his face before.

But because she had written him into existence.

Her phone vibrated again.

A final message from Meghna.

“He’s found you.”

The lights flickered.

Somewhere in the room, a brush scraped against canvas.

And Abira—frozen at her desk—realized she was no longer alone.