Dila hadn’t yet admitted to herself that she was in love with Fatih.
Two weeks was far too short for that. Could someone get attached enough in two weeks to miss the sound of another person’s voice? They had met on the same team in an online game, first admiring each other’s reflexes, then slipping into each other’s lives through messages that mingled with the quiet of Istanbul at night. Dila didn’t dare call it love. Love was a bigger word. More real. More dangerous.
And yet, whenever Fatih went offline, she would look at the upper-right corner of the screen and wait for him to log back into the game.
It was raining in Kadıköy that evening. As Dila walked out of the ferry terminal with her bag held over her head, she checked her phone three times. There was no new message from Fatih.
Their last conversation was still on her screen.
“I have to leave early today. We’ll play tomorrow.”
Tomorrow.
It was only one word, but Dila had carried it around all day. Would Fatih really play tomorrow? Or had he said it just to end the conversation politely? She had even thought over and over about the fact that he hadn’t put a smiley face at the end of the message. When people weren’t sure how the other person felt, they clung to punctuation marks.
Fatih was in the same city. Maybe he was under the same rain, waiting at a bus stop, or watching the lights from his apartment window. The more Dila thought about it, the smaller the distance between them became—until she remembered the truth and it grew again: They hadn’t even properly looked each other in the face yet.
A username in a game wasn’t the same as a person. It was easy to be brave there. Easy to send a character into danger, easy to start over after losing. In real life, when a message went unanswered, there wasn’t a screen waiting for you to start again.
When Dila got home, she sat on the edge of her bed without taking off her coat. She picked up her phone. A green light was glowing on Fatih’s profile.
He was online.
Dila’s heart sped up as if it had been waiting for this. She could log into the game. She could type, “Are you ready?” as if nothing had happened. Or she could be bolder and say, “I thought about you today.”
Her thumb hovered over the keyboard.
“Hey,” she typed.
Then deleted it.
“How are you today?” she typed.
Then deleted it.
“Did you miss me?”
This time, she didn’t delete it. She stared at the screen. Even before it was sent, the sentence felt too exposed. Like setting her pride aside and placing herself in front of Fatih.
Just as she was about to delete it, a message arrived from Fatih.
“Aren’t you asleep?”
Dila stopped breathing. She felt as if Fatih could see her waiting in front of the screen.
“No,” she typed. “You?”
“I couldn’t sleep either.”
Dila wanted to ask why. She wanted to say, “Because you were thinking about me?” But she only entered the game lobby.
Fatih sent her an invite.
The same map from the game where they had met two weeks earlier opened. A virtual city resembling Istanbul’s lights at night glowed quietly inside the screen. Fatih’s character appeared beside Dila’s. In the game, it was easy for them to move toward each other; they could do everything there that they couldn’t do in real life with just a few keystrokes.
“How was your day?” Fatih asked.
“Rainy.”
“Isn’t Istanbul always like that anyway?”
“Sometimes it rains outside, and sometimes it rains inside you.”
Dila regretted the message as soon as she sent it. It had been too revealing. Fatih didn’t answer for several seconds.
“Is it raining inside you?” he finally typed.
Dila stopped moving her character.
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know, think about it.”
“Do you think?”
“A lot.”
“What do you think about?”
Fatih’s character stopped in the middle of the virtual square. Dila couldn’t see his real face, but she could feel his hesitation.
“Sometimes,” Fatih typed, “you want to tell someone something, but you’re afraid everything will change once you do.”
Dila’s fingers went cold.
“Is changing a bad thing?”
“That depends on what changes.”
Dila stared at the screen. Fatih’s words weren’t a confession. But they weren’t an ordinary conversation, either. Something unnamed stood between them. They both touched it, then pulled back as if it were going to hurt.
Dila could have typed, “I like you.”
Maybe Fatih would laugh. Maybe he would say, “Me too.” Or maybe he would think she was taking two weeks too seriously. The most frightening possibility was that Fatih would quietly go silent.
So Dila took refuge in her pride to protect herself.
“You think too much,” she typed. “I think you should think a little less.”
Fatih answered a few seconds later.
“You should be a little braver.”
This time, Dila’s heart pounded not with joy, but with the fear of being found out.
“I am brave.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Am I?”
“I don’t know.”
Those three words lifted all of Dila’s hopes at once, then dropped them to the ground. Fatih wasn’t sure, either. Maybe he liked her, or maybe he simply liked having someone to talk to at night. Maybe what Dila felt was nothing more than a pleasant habit of the game to Fatih.
Dila logged out of the game.
“What happened?” Fatih asked.
“I’m getting sleepy.”
“Dila.”
Just seeing him type her name was enough. Dila turned back to the screen.
“What?”
Fatih didn’t type for a long time. As Istanbul’s rain left fine lines on the window, Dila fought with herself in the middle of that silence. She wanted to make the first move. But the first move was the moment you began waiting for something in return. Dila wasn’t afraid of getting no response; she was afraid her feelings would be belittled.
At last, Fatih typed:
“Are you going out tomorrow?”
All the sentences inside Dila fell silent.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe where?”
“Istanbul is a big place.”
“I’m in Istanbul too.”
This time, they both fell silent.
Dila tried to figure out whether Fatih really wanted to meet. Fatih was probably trying to figure out whether she wanted to meet, too. When two people tried to take a step toward each other at the same time, they could end up staying exactly where they were.
“If you want,” Fatih typed, “we could get coffee sometime.”
Sometime.
Dila could have written, “Sure.” She could have said, “Let’s meet tomorrow.” Instead, she only typed:
“We’ll see.”
She regretted it the moment the message went through.
The online light beside Fatih’s name went out.
Dila set her phone on her knees. Her pride had protected her. At least she hadn’t had to endure the embarrassment of an unanswered invitation. But in the silence of the room, she realized this wasn’t a victory. She had let Fatih leave because she hadn’t dared tell him she wanted him to stay.
She walked to the window. The lights in the building across the street blurred in the rain. Istanbul could make millions of people live side by side without ever touching. Dila thought that Fatih might be a few miles away. Under the same sky, he could be looking at his phone with the same fear.
Her phone vibrated again.
There was a single message from Fatih:
“Dila, if you really don’t want to, tell me. I don’t want to pressure you.”
Dila closed her eyes.
This was the truth. Fatih was afraid, too. He was afraid of not getting anything in return. Maybe they would both spend the whole night thinking about each other, waiting for the other to make the first move.
Dila began to type.
“I want to.”
She stopped.
That one sentence was heavier than all the silence of the past two weeks.
Before she pressed Send, she heard a ferry horn somewhere in Istanbul. As night closed over the city, Dila thought for the first time: Maybe the reason they couldn’t be together wasn’t that they didn’t love each other. Maybe neither of them dared to love without first hearing that they were loved.
Her finger hovered over the Send button.
And for the first time in her life, Dila was about to make a move she couldn’t restart like she could in a game.