Arshita's Blog (PART 2)

recap: Arshita's phone had been dead the whole day. Once her father repaired it, she switched it on and promptly got a massive shock.

Her phone was flooded with 374 new notifications. 374! She clicked on them eagerly, praying they weren't spamming. It'd been just one day, and it appeared her blog was absolutely flooded with likes and comments. Excited, she logged in, and read the comments hungrily. To her sheer delight, they ranged from 'SOMEONE PUT IT INTO WORDS' to 'THIS IS THE POST I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR MY WHOLE LIFE', making her giggle out loud.

This was now Arshita's secret. So to the world, Arshita seemed like an ordinary girl. Her life was normal, with an annoying younger brother, decent grades, a vivid imagination; but on the internet, she was someone that people listened to. Her internet life was far removed from her daily life, and she felt like a new person on the internet. When her fingers flew over the keyboard as she poured her heart out, she felt empowered, large, significant. It was a lovely feeling.

Over two weeks, she'd gained a very large following. And they seemed to want hope. They seemed to want something to hold on to amidst all the craziness worldwide. So she told them, at length, how they should stay at home, wash their hands, and believe in a tomorrow. That was the only way it would come. She told them to look at the stars, to breathe clean city air because humans' lives were the only ones that had stopped. Birds, trees, nature was all still free and thriving.

She made friends with other bloggers, too. There was Seth from California, who wrote funny poems about all the antics he got up to with his twin sister Becky. There was Aurelle, from somewhere in France, who was absolutely brilliant at inspirational poems. Reading them made you feel like you could achieve anything in the world. Nakamoto Yuta from Hokkaido wrote short literary pieces with twists you never saw coming, and Kim Jisoo from Daegu, South Korea, wrote limericks, sonnets, and couplets. Ilaria from Venice posted pictures of her journal, extremely pretty pages of layered paper and beautiful doodles.

Lastly, there was a new friend she'd made, Karan from Orissa. She talked to him a lot and discovered that they had quite a lot in common.

Her parents minded that she spent so long on a screen. They kept advising her not to use the computer for so long, but blogging was now her guilty pleasure. She couldn't believe that she found her passion so serendipitously, because of an army of microscopic viruses with the aspiration of world domination. Who knew?

And then one-day disaster struck. Karan disappeared. He didn't come online for two weeks. The days leading up to his disappearance had been kind of odd, Arshita realized, after carefully reading their chats out of boredom. He'd seemed tense, unsettled. And then one day Karan called up.

"Hello?" Arshita said, relieved to have heard from Karan again.

She heard harsh, ragged sobbing on the other end of the receiver.

(to be continued....)