scopaesthesia

[delicateMachine]

((Lark felt like she was being watched.))

She curiously looked up from her phone, but her usual lunchtime garden was as desolate as ever. No wandering extroverts nor drama club associates approached, and even the rare passerby didn’t deign to glance her way. This suited her well enough, she hadn’t dressed to stand out. A gray sweatshirt was only technically a statement.

Whatever. She returned to the chat where she had been swapping music recommendations with a friend who thought she was a 19-year-old gas station worker named Kyle. She’d naively nudged that identity to be a year older than she’d been at the time, a childish attempt to give her words a little more weight - but when you didn’t burn your burner accounts, they got older. Were presumed to have life experiences of their own, hitting insignificant little milestones like graduating high school and getting an apartment.

Last year, Lark’d stayed up for a whole night, trying to figure out what Kyle was going to do with his life. The less specific, the better - nothing disprovable, nothing requiring specialized knowledge beyond an internet search or two. That meant college was straight out, and really, the simplest answer was the best one. There were a million Kyles in the world, working shitty minimum-wage jobs: she could picture a hazy ghost of him, standing in front of her. Baseball cap over short brown hair, face pimply and bored.

It was probably the most she’d ever had to develop one of her lies, but in fairness, she hadn’t planned on sticking around the forum. Certainly not for… what was it, three years at this point? But she’d never left, had even migrated to the Discord server. She liked the people, despite herself. They were crude, but it was interesting to see them write about music, really write about it, once you cut through all the obnoxious elitism. And, of course, some of them were more tolerable than others, which was how she’d stumbled into making one of her only internet friends.

Even after a year of talking with Danny, she still got the occasional nagging feeling of guilt when she had to make up a story about how her - Kyle’s - day had gone, even though an exasperated ‘customers, am I right’ usually sufficed. Her little mask-making habit had been meant as an experiment for communities as a whole; not for making individual connections.

The guilt never lasted for long, though. It wasn’t like she was manipulating Danny. she wasn’t getting anything except companionship. She didn’t lie about her thoughts or opinions, and she’d long since given up on the artificial mannerisms she’d given Kyle on the day of his creation. The experience of talking to Lark online was essentially identical to the experience of talking to Kyle, as long as their lives weren’t relevant to the conversation.

Her friend was her friend. He just thought she was someone else entirely, someone who didn’t exist. Did that poison the whole dynamic, on a conceptual level? Was it doomed, immoral? She sometimes wondered if they’d have ever talked in the first place if she’d simply stayed herself. The first-contact dynamic of casually sending shitty memes to ‘that guy, Kyle’ was worlds apart from doing the same thing to ‘Actual Online Girl, Lark.’

If her deception was ever caught, ‘Kyle’ could be erased in an instant, with nothing tracing his years of existence to Lark, which was comforting yet existentially disturbing. The ultimate evolution of ghosting - never having been born at all. Well, hopefully the friendship would just fizzle out naturally before any inconvenient truths came to light. For the time being, she’d just have to enjoy that her lunchtimes were slightly less boring than they had been.

The uneasy feeling faded, and she