Digital Ghosts

Sarah sat on the floor of Maya's apartment, the golden retriever's head resting on her thigh. Three weeks after the funeral, and Sarah still couldn't bring herself to pack up Maya's life. The dog—Barnaby—whined softly, sensing the silence that had settled like dust.

"I know, buddy," Sarah murmured, scratching behind his ears. "I miss her too."

Maya had been her friend for seventeen years, since college, when they'd both been poor and optimistic and convinced the world would bend to their will. Instead, the world had broken Maya slowly, quietly, until the day she simply didn't wake up. An accidental overdose, the coroner said. Sarah knew better.

On the coffee table sat a bottle of vitamin D supplements—Maya had been obsessive about them, convinced they cured everything from seasonal depression to existential dread. Sarah had started taking them too, some weird transference of hope.

She picked up Maya's iPhone from the table, the phone still charged because Sarah kept plugging it in. The device had become a sacred object, a portal to the version of Maya that lived in text messages and voice notes and Instagram stories. Sarah scrolled through their last conversation:

i feel like i'm disappearing, Maya had written at 2 AM.

u ok? Sarah had responded.

yea just tired. everything's fine.

And then, nothing.

Sarah's thumb hovered over the compose button, the impulse to text Maya still so visceral it made her chest ache. How many times had she reached out like this, expecting a reply that would never come?

Barnaby lifted his head and let out a sharp bark, staring at the door as if expecting Maya to walk through it, keys jingling, already apologizing for being late.

"She's not coming back," Sarah said aloud, the words finally real. "She's not."

She set down the phone, gathered Barnaby in her arms, and finally let herself cry—not the polite tears of the funeral, but the gutting sobs she'd been holding back. The vitamins could wait. The digital ghost of her friend could wait. For now, there was just this: grief, messy and unfinished, and the weight of a dog who'd lost his person, and the terrible work of learning how to keep living when the world had already broken your heart.