Would It Have Killed To Smile More?

"I don't want to see you again!" These were the last words she ever said to me. What drove her to this mixture of anger, frustration and possibly regret afterwards, I'm not so sure of that. What I do know is that when she said those words to me, I never thought I'd never get to hear her sweet, gentle voice again.

It all started a year ago, I was just playing a simple, free game. Nothing too special, it was a game I'd never download unless I was very bored. Luckily, I was really bored at the time. A few minutes into playing a girl approached my avatar and started sending messages my way. "How are you?", "What's your name?", "Do you not know how to type, silly?" She kept asking me questions until I admitted defeat and answered her.

Little did I know, that that one message I sent her, was the start of something good, better than I ever could've expected. She would keep asking me more and more questions, genuinely being interested in what I had to say. That night where I was so bored, I ended up talking to her until 2am. And when I logged off, I still didn't want to stop talking to her.

I don't know what came over me that night, was it the way she talked? Her excitement? Her clumsy, yet funny personality? I'm not sure, but I knew I didn't want to stop there. For the first time in forever, I actually wanted to talk to a person again. Most of my conversations at that time were with either my boss, family or that one girl in the swim club I'm in. But never did I fully enjoy my time talking to them.

Somehow, this girl was different. She made me happy by just being there, and smiling. Showing interest in the things I did and said. For me, that was enough to keep coming back to that game, no matter how bad it was. After a few days, she told me her name. Not her name online, that one I knew from the start. Rather, her real name, the girl I would continue to talk to, was named 'Charity'.

I told her my name right after that 'Ren'. She smiled and looked at me with the biggest smile yet. "That's a beautiful name!" She said with pure innocence in her voice. But after all of that, she never knew how much she meant to me.

She would always look so happy whilst she was talking to me. She'd talk about all sorts of things, how her day was today. How college was a nightmare, how she'd eventually find out what I looked like, since she was curious. But through all of that, I always looked at her with a blank expression on my face. I'm not sure why I did this, did I perhaps not know how to express my feelings. I can't dwell on that now, after all, she never seemed to comment on it.

A few months had gone by when we heard that the game we'd meet up on, was shutting down. It didn't come as a surprise to me, the game wasn't particularly good, it was a pretty simple game with a player base of maybe a few hundred people. But to Charity, it meant so much more to her than it did to me. That day she didn't smile, she wasn't enthusiastic about anything, she'd just stare off into the sunset.

I asked her, after a few hours of her sitting in the small cottage we made on that game what was bothering her. Her avatar looked at me and said "When the game shuts down, I won't be able to talk to you anymore!" The game's communication system was chat based. But if there was a voice chat in there, I'm sure she would've screamed those words whilst being on the verge of crying.

I didn't show any emotion when I saw what she said, rather I sent 10 numbers. My phone number to be more precise. I remember her avatar standing still for about 10 minutes, not saying anything or doing anything until I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. When I checked it, I'd gotten a message that read: "Ren?! OMG! Did you really just give me your phone number?!"

I was fully aware that it could've been someone different than Charity, she could've given the number to one of her friends to prank me. But the way she sent that text, I knew immediately that it was her. I confirmed that it was me and we both saved each other's phone number. A few minutes after that we both closed our game and ended up chatting to each other through text until her battery ran out.