longer.blue

⸻ “Respawn” I wake up sweating again. The room is too warm, even with the fans blasting. Four of them, maybe five—I don’t remember. They’re always running. Not for the heat. For the sound. I need the noise. Without it, the silence gets ideas. The basement suite is still. Stale. No AC. The windows are too high and too small, letting in nothing but a grey film that settles over everything like dust. I don’t open them. I don’t look outside. I don’t need a reminder that the world’s still spinning without me. The garbage overflows. Dishes crust over in the sink. My laundry’s molding in the washer because I forgot about it a week ago. My bed’s a chaotic pile of blankets and old clothes and whatever dreams I don’t remember having. I navigate through the mess like a rat in a ruined maze. Sometimes I think about cleaning. Then I don’t. If I’m not working, I’m gaming. If I’m working, I’m waiting to be home so I can game again. That’s the pattern. That’s the whole loop. ⸻ Work is a phone store in a mall that smells like dust and disinterest. I sell phones and plans to people who either don’t look at me or look through me. “Can you help me, sir?” they ask, and I nod and say “of course” like that word doesn’t burn every time. I don’t correct them. It’s easier not to. What would I even say? That I’m non-binary? Transfemme? That I want people to see a woman in me even though they never do? That I wish I had a body shaped by softness instead of shame? There’s no field for that in our customer service survey. So I smile. I explain roaming add-ons. I reset phones. I pretend this isn’t killing me. Every day I walk out of that place I feel flatter. More pixelated. Like someone left me on pause too long and now I’m stuck like this—half-loaded. ⸻ Back home, I don’t eat. I queue. Overwatch. Again. Always. Because in there, I know how to improve. I track my stats. I watch replays. I climb. Slowly. Painfully. But I climb. The game gives me what nothing else does: a system that reacts to effort. If I work at it, I get better. If I focus, I rise. Outside the game, I forget to pay bills. Forget to eat. Forget why I walked into a room. Inside the game, I remember things. Tracer is my main. She’s fast. She’s focused. She undoes mistakes. I want to be her. Not just to play her—to become something sharp and kinetic and unashamed. I hear people in comms call me “he” and I mute them. Sometimes—rarely—someone calls me “she” and I say nothing. I just sit there in the afterglow like it means something sacred. Because it does. ⸻ Some nights I dream about her. The version of me that feels like truth. Long hair. Brighter skin. A voice that doesn’t betray her. She moves through space without apology. People see her and don’t question. She wears clothes I don’t dare to. She smiles without scanning the room first. She is me. But only in sleep. I wake up, and the difference feels like mourning. I never buried her. She never lived. She’s just stuck somewhere behind my eyes, waiting for me to figure it out. ⸻ I lie in bed with the fan noise pressing against the ceiling. The monitor glows, the cursor hovers over “Play.” I could queue. I probably will. But tonight, I hesitate. I close the game. I sit in the dark. For a long time, I don’t move. And in that stillness, something almost like a voice stirs—not out loud, but somewhere behind the noise, under the exhaustion. “You’re not wrong. You’re not broken. You’re just unfinished.” It isn’t hope. But it’s something. And it’s enough to try again tomorrow.