A story · House of Mirrors
The Group Chat That Still Has Her In It
A short interactive story about opening a group chat where everyone is "online 3 minutes ago," posting nothing, and closing it again. You choose what she does with the feeling; there are four possible endings.
It is 8:40 on a Friday night and Nadia opens the group chat for no particular reason, the way you'd check a fridge you already know is empty.
Meera
online
Jonas
active 2m ago
Priya
active just now
Everyone's there. That's the specific shape of tonight's feeling, and it's taken her a while to be able to name it that precisely: it isn't that nobody's around. Three green dots, right there, proof of a group very much awake and reachable at 8:40 on a Friday. She is, technically, one of eleven people in this chat, a chat that has existed for six years and has her name in it same as anyone else's.
Nobody's said anything in four hours. The last message is a meme Jonas sent that got two laughing reactions and no replies. Nadia scrolls up a little, past the meme, past a half-formed plan for a trip that never quite got booked, further up to a stretch from March where the chat was genuinely alive for two straight weeks — everyone commenting, a real rhythm, the specific aliveness of a group that still felt like one thing rather than eleven separate people who used to be a thing.
She doesn't know when exactly it stopped feeling like that. There wasn't an event. Nobody left, nobody fought, nobody said anything unkind. The chat is still here, the dots are still green, and something about it feels emptier than an actually empty room would.
Her thumb hovers over the message box. Nothing is typed into it.