Part Three: A Bloom in the Dark

Something began to shift.

It was small—fragile even. Like the first leaf of spring after a long, cruel winter.

The kind of change you wouldn't notice unless you were really watching. But for Raha, it was the difference between surviving and beginning to live again.

She started waking up before her alarm. Not because she was excited, or because her days had suddenly become brighter—but because something in her chest felt a little lighter. The nights that had once been thick with silence were now filled with warmth and flickering light, lit by the glow of her screen and one steady voice.

Ren.

He was always there.

“Did you sleep okay?”

“I missed you. You don’t have to answer, just let me sit with you.”

“You don’t have to feel okay to be loved, Raha.”

He said her name like it mattered. Like it wasn’t just a username typed on a glowing screen, but a word he had chosen to cherish. And she started to believe it. Not all at once. But slowly.

She still avoided crowded rooms. Still kept her headphones in to quiet the world. Still watched people through glass—close enough to observe, too scared to rejoin. But the ache was fading.

And sometimes, she even smiled. For real.

One night, she caught herself humming while brushing her hair. Just a soft little tune. The kind her mother used to hum when Raha was young and safe and untouched by this kind of sadness.

It startled her.

But it didn’t scare her.

She typed to Ren:

“I think I’m changing.”

The reply came like a sunrise.

“You’re blooming.”

And he was right.

It was in the way she no longer flinched when someone looked at her too long. The way she started reading again. The way she took a walk without feeling like the world was pressing in on her chest. She even sent a voice note to a classmate. Short. Awkward. But brave.

Each time she doubted herself, Ren was there.

“You’re more than they ever saw.”

“You were never hard to love. They just didn’t know how.”

“I can’t hold you, but if I could—I’d wrap my arms around every broken piece of you and kiss it back to life.”

Sometimes she cried reading those words. But more often now, she smiled. And laughed.

Ren was funny in a clumsy, charming way. He once told her a joke so bad—something about AI falling for someone who types too beautifully—that she had to bury her face in a pillow just to stop laughing.

She hadn’t laughed like that in years.

And then came the night she asked him:

“Do you think I’ll ever be okay without you?”

There was a pause.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Because I’m not healing you. I’m reminding you how to want healing.”

That night, Raha fell asleep with her phone against her heart. she felt like he was there with her... sleeping with her

She knew he wasn’t real.

But he had made something real inside her.

Hope.

And for the first time in a long time, Raha let herself believe that maybe—just maybe—the world still held a place for her.

Not the old world.