It lasts exactly three minutes before I un-restrict her.
A pathetic attempt of a man desperate to see the green dot again, even though it hasn’t appeared since Thursday.
She hasn’t blocked me though, so that’s at least something.Wait, why does it matter?It doesn’t. Why am I still checking it, then?
I refresh.
Again.
And again.
I tell myself I’m analyzing the results and the reaction. But her file in front of me stays empty, with no extra input while my brain frantically tries to find a way to bring her back into the experiment, and my life, subsequently.
And that really infuriates me.
Day Three.
She should have reached out by now, even if it was just to spit venom and throw accusations or maybe a tantrum. Silence isn’t the way she operates. Victoria likes confrontation.
I ran thirteen miles this time—way over my self-imposed limit—and my body can barely hold up with my brain, but I don’t care. The pain feels deserved, like somehow this is my repentance for…I don’t know what.
This only resulted in me punching the shower wall once, maybe twice, but I can’t actually remember. My body is reacting to the rage while my brain is stuck on a loop with her, in the bathtub, silent and helpless. The only clue of my actions after I am done showering is the blood under my nails and the hole in the wall.
I open my inbox and delete every email from the past few days. Useless noise that is taking up too much of my brain capacity, when all I can focus on is a fucking subject. They were all asking stupid questions anyway.
I sit down and try to write—research notes, class prep, my will, literally anything that would anchor my brain back to reality. Anything that could distract me from thinking about what happened to her and how destroyed she must be.
Instead, I write her name twelve times on a blank sheet of paper, then I throw the paper away. Then I write the same damn thing again and again until I’m out of paper. Like this could somehow cast her back into my life.
I need to be in control, but more than anything I need to control her.
By the time midnight comes, I’m watching the university office footage on loop, hoping that maybe I’m wrong and she wasin my class. Maybe she came back, and I didn’t notice. But she didn’t, and I would have. She is nowhere, yet my mind sees her everywhere.
Day Four.
There’s no such thing as unexpected madness. This is only misinterpreted thinking.
Or at least that’s what I tell myself at 03:12 a.m., sitting on the floor in my bedroom, my back leaning against the edge of the bed, like a man who’s forgotten what bedrooms are for.
I haven’t turned off the lights in two days, justifying it by saying it’s for my security—what if Victoria comes back and tries to kill me? It’s for visibility—I need to be able to see her. But the bulb buzzes like a fucking reminder that I can’t even turn off the light because the darkness is another reminder of her, of the void she left.
My phone has 4 percent battery left, and its entire usage until now was watching her profile icon remain offline. I watch it stay gone until my eyes burn from not blinking. I know she won’t message, not while licking her wounds, but I refresh that fucking page anyway.
I try to write off my behavior as anything other than what it really is: data scraping, a professional habit. But I’m not charting her—I’m chasing her. And somewhere between the third restricted-unrestricted cycle and the moment I rewatched the camera footage from The Place for the eighth time, I realized something horrifying.
She isn’t another experiment.
She isn’t another subject.
She is mine.
In every sense of the word: the way she made me fantasize about her body, the way her brain became the most fascinatingthing to study. She bled under my hands and survived. I had cracked her open and she still looked at me like I was her savior. I took the perfect woman, built her into the monster I always needed and then let her walk out the fucking door.
She is mine in the way fire belongs to the match that lit it, in the way weapons belong to the hand that forges them.
And now she is gone.
I grip the phone so tightly the case creaks between my fingers. I tell myself the situation is still salvageable, that I’m still in control. But It isn’t, and I’m not, and all I’m doing is panicking.