Chapter Text
Sometimes, she found it strange how a person could turn out to be so so important to you without ever sharing the same physical space— And it wasn't like Samira was new to online friendships; she had them since she was in high school. There were people she'd never met in person, but she knew them in ways, that, at times, felt more intimate than her relationships with the folks she encountered on a day to day basis.
Jay, however, was different from the start.
She knew it —knew the shape of this fact— but she could never fully explain why, even to herself, on those restless nights when she lay awake staring at the ceiling, trying to pin down what set him apart.
Maybe it was the way he listened.
He had a way of making her words feel like puzzle pieces she scattered across the living room of their friendship— and he, a stranger who didn't know her name or her face, would willingly gather them up, and assemble them into the image he held of her. And despite it he never pressed. He never demanded more than she offered, and he never made her feel obligated to explain the parts of herself she withheld, and wasn't ready to reveal.
Samira didn't know his real name, just as he didn't know hers; she didn't know his age, his job, or whether he had siblings, if his parents were alive, and if he had memories that haunted him the way hers, more often than not, did. Despite this she knew him. Knew the shape of his humor, how he could make her laugh or smile with something as ordinary as his unfiltered thoughts about his day.
She knew he worked nights and he enjoyed old music.
And she learned quickly enough not to bring up romance because the silence that followed told her everything. Jay just was private, in a deliberate way, as if he had drawn a clear line around certain parts of his life and his identity, waiting to see if she would respect it— or walk away.
Samira chose to stay.
And it all began with a single post.
Pittsburgh in early August felt sticky and despite the last few days of Summer, gray with that sort of humidity that clung to your skin and made the air feel thick even as you breathed it in, and Samira had been in the city for a little over three weeks when she'd started her first year at Pitt Med. She'd spent most of that time either in her new flat unpacking boxes she hauled from New Jersey or walking the streets, trying to memorize the layout of this city that still felt foreign.
Her mother had cried at the train station the day she left. Samira had hugged her tight, and promised to call every Sunday, before she’d boarded the Amtrak with a lump in her throat she still refused to acknowledge. She'd been so focused on getting here; on the acceptance letter and the scholarships, the research proposal she'd spent an entire year refining, that she hadn't let herself think about what it would mean to actually leave.
Yet she was here now, alone in a city that smelled of river water and steel where the hills rose up steep on each side of the Monongahela, and where the bridges stretched out like iron ribs against the sky.
And her apartment was so small. A flat in Oakland close to campus with a kitchenette which barely felt a hot plate and a window that faced a brick wall. Still it was hers, the rent was manageable, and she'd hung posters and photos from her childhood bedroom all over, the very first thing she did, so it felt less like a box and more like a home.
Classes started in two days and Samira had already spent the summer reading ahead, annotating all her textbooks until her eyes burned. Yet she couldn't shake the nervous energy that buzzed under her skin.
Medical school had been the goal for so long; the one she worked toward through undergrad, through MCAT prep, through every application and interview— intermittently between waiting, waiting and more waiting she’d almost forgotten what came after. The actual doing of it.
But what had been occupying most of her attention lately was precisely the research project she'd secured funding for. A 5 year retrospective chart review examining racial disparities in emergency care. She'd pitched it during her interviews, she’d spent months refining the methodology and somehow she had convinced the right people to take a chance on her— a first-year medical student with more ambition than experience.
But Dr. Adamson had encouraged her, and his team, like Dr. Robby, welcomed her in and suddenly she had access to PTMC's records. She’d spent her days in lectures and some evenings at the hospital— pulling charts and noting patterns; trying to understand why all of the data looked the way it did.
Sure, the work was tedious but it was important. To her. To Adamson, who believed in her. And at least it kept her from thinking about how far she was from home.
But on those first August nights before any of it had even begun, when the charts blurred, and her eyes burned she indulged herself, although it did her no good, and stayed awake. Usually on Twitter.
It was a small mercy, somewhere where she could be just a screen and a handle and a set of opinions and thoughts she didn't have to defend or make sense of in person. She mostly followed medical accounts, but a few music critics and comedians as well and most of her friends from New Jersey and often simply lurked, retweeting and liking the memes, the strange local news, political posts or the few from the fandoms she considered her community, on her feed— Just noise, the kind of low stakes stuff that let her brain rest without fully shutting down.
And one of those nights, she was about to put the phone down when a tweet caught her eye.
← Tweet
jay (⋮)
@jaywalksalone
I don't know who needs to hear this today, but the pigeons have no idea what they are doing with life either, y'know? Sometimes, they're just winging it.
02:33 AM · 08/06/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 32 ↳ ↰ 75 ❤︎ 365
She snorted. And it was such a small stupid thing, really; a dad joke disguised as advice, or as a clever observation, but it still landed somehow. She could picture the person behind it. Someone who noticed small things, who found humor in the mundane, who was willing to admit maybe nobody had anything figured out.
So, Samira liked the tweet, and kept scrolling. She didn't think about it again for some time. It was nothing. Just a random interaction online, only one of thousands others she had that week.
Except the very next week, another tweet of his appeared on her feed.
← Tweet
jay (⋮)
@jaywalksalone
Has no one ever thought how reading for pleasure implies the existence of reading for pain?
Strange.
01:42 AM · 08/13/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 13 ↳ ↰ 50 ❤︎ 84
And then? That is when it all started.
It was just... stupid. That was the thing.
It wasn't profound or even particularly clever and Samira had scrolled past it twice, before she’d stopped then went back up.
Reading for pleasure implies the existence of reading for pain.
She stared at it for quite a while, as she snorted, shaking her head. A joke that wasn't a joke— a sort of observation that landed somewhere between the absurd and the true.
She'd been in Pittsburgh for nearly one month. Her place still smelled like cardboard since most of her things were inside the numerous boxes strewn around. She often ate sitting on the floor with her back leaning against the bed; no table or desk. She just hadn't gotten around to buying more than the sparse furniture that came with it.
And she had spent the afternoon reading about the Krebs cycle until her eyes burned.
Which is why the tweet struck her as ironic, maybe, even fitting. It’d seem she herself was becoming familiar with reading for pain, and the reality of student life in medical school. So she'd liked it.
And though manifesting it, she kept seeing him.
@Jaywalksalone reappeared on her feed a few days later with a retweet of a panel from a Hellboy comic issue she vaguely recognized. Then, a thread about Dune that went on, for quite some time. And a tweet of his own; a picture of rain on asphalt, captioned with a lyric from some song she didn't know at all.
He wasn't even posting constantly— maybe, two or three times a week—, but his account had a specific shape to it. Architecture. The guy liked comic books, film franchises like Star Wars and TV shows like Doctor Who. As well as grunge music from the late 90s, and the early 2000s. He probably was in his late twenties or his early thirties. The sort of person who had grown up with a nerd of a father, like she did, with an odd nostalgia for a decade he barely remembered.
Samira didn't think about it consciously too often.
She just found herself clicking on his profile, sometimes. Scrolling back through his tweets and retweets as though she were reading a book from the middle.
His bio had a Camus quote, one from the Plague, "I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment, I know this: there are sick people, and they need curing." And nothing more except an emoji of a stethoscope.
It said he was from Pittsburgh there, as well. His header? a photograph of the Monongahela at sunset. His profile a distinguished picture of a German Shepherd dog wearing a pair of reading glasses.
Soon September arrived. With its humidity and its forms and her terrible, no good very bad idea of submitting her project to the IRB. She had spent the summer refining it. Reading everything she could get her hands on. And then preparing for the inevitable questions, and the rejections that came with being a first year medical student with no real experience and her type of ambition.
But she couldn't submit it alone.
That was the first thing she learned.
She needed a Principal Investigator. She needed a faculty member. Anyone with enough institutional standing who could, or rather, would sign off. Take responsibility.
She'd approached six faculty members by the third week. Before finding a single one who would even look at it.
The first few smiled politely. One even said, "That is very brave… for a first year." The next had told her she should focus on her coursework first— which she was, of course. So, fuck him. Whatever. The sixth, notably, said nothing. She just stared at her for a moment and then handed her the proposal right back as though it were a piece of trash that someone had left on her desk.
She was ready to give up. She'd told herself it was fine.
She’d wait until her second year, since there was no rush, but Samira hadn't been able to stop thinking all about it. No. That just wasn’t her style.
She'd find herself lying on bed, phone in hand, scrolling, thinking, ruminating. And there he'd be. A regular in the static. A familiar unfamiliar parasocial relationship and a reprieve between her, the mundane and the school grind.
By the end of September she'd seen enough of his feed to piece together a version of him. However flawed— and it wasn’t like she was parasocial enough to delude herself it wasn’t otherwise— it likely was.
He had an obvious taste, and his account— like her time in Twitter and the other handful of social media apps she spent a questionable amount of time in— was like clearly an echo chamber for him. He retweeted fanarts of many different pieces of media in between song lyrics, between quotes-of-the-day accounts from bands from the 90s and 2000s, from philosophers and poets of the 20th and the 21st century. Between the occasional post of his own, like a photograph of a sunrise from some rooftop with a short caption "This is what heaven looks like, if you believe in that sort of thing."
He had a taste— a way to go about sharing his day to day. Eclectic, specific, deeply earnest and guarded all at once.
She almost replied to many of his tweets. Willing herself to reach him. She wanted to meet him, to be friends with him as silly as it might've sounded. Everytime, she'd type out a reply, deleted it. Typed another before deleting that one too. She didn't even know why she couldn't commit. She wasn't going about it any differently than she’d done with her many online friends. But it just felt like stepping into a room she hadn't been invited into.
By the time she actually did it, it was October.
Samira had just finished her first round of exams and felt her brain was mush. Her place was dark, and she’d just gotten home. She threw herself to her couch, she reached out for her phone, and before she knew it, was scrolling through Twitter, procrastinating on dinner. And then she saw one of his tweets. A brand new one. He'd posted one hour ago.
That wasn't what was often the case, oddly enough.
She always seemed to see tweets that were hours, or even days old. Strangely he didn’t seem to be online often, nor during most of the day.
← Tweet
Jay (⋮)
@jaywalksalone
Just woke up again. Not thrilled, but I'll see how it plays out.
05:16 PM · 10/07/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 4 ↳ ↰ 51 ❤︎ 88
There was something about it that hit differently.
The casual self-deprication, the way it skirted the edge of something without diving in. She recognized the impulse in herself. To joke about the exhaustion, the overwhelm, and the constant low-level dread of never being enough.
Because admitting it outright felt too heavy for the space it'd occupy.
Samira typed: "that's the spirit!". Then she deleted it. Too sarcastic, too glib. She typed again: "Hey, some days that is all you can do, right?"
Worse. Wow. So much fucking worse.
A part of her, nagging, reminded her she didn't and likely wouldn't ever know this man. Definitely not at this rate.
She stared at the screen for a moment, as she typed one more time:
← Tweet
Jay (⋮)
@jaywalksalone
Just woke up again. Not thrilled, but I'll see how it plays out.
05:16 PM · 10/07/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 4 ↳ ↰ 51 ❤︎ 88
_______________________________________
Mir @mostlymir · 1 m (⋮)
Replying to @jaywalksalone
That’s the spirit!
06:43 PM · 10/07/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
She hit send, and locked her phone while setting it down besides her as she covered her face with her hands with a groan. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” a different part of her asked, incredulous. “What exactly do you want out of him? Why is he so special to you?”
She didn't check her phone again until the next morning, though he hadn't replied.
She didn't expect him to.
But the very next week he posted something new.
A photo of him with a Vonnegut book open on his thighs, sitting in some armchair by a window, and she replied to it too. Then again, a few days later:
← Tweet
Jay (⋮)
@jaywalksalone
…Is it just me or does October feel like the universe is trying to say "hey, I know you're going through it, so here’s some pretty leaves, and the perfect excuse to consume pumpkin flavored things"?
Noted and appreciated.
07:54 AM · 10/13/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 21 ↳ ↰ 46 ❤︎ 74
_______________________________________
Mir @mostlymir · 1 m (⋮)
Replying to @jaywalksalone
I needed this reframe, actually 🤔
09:19 AM · 10/13/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
And then, one night in late October, she opened her app, and saw a single notification.
@jaywalksalone liked your tweet.
← Tweet
Mir (⋮)
@mostlymir
I'm proud to be a woman in STEM (stress, turmoil, emotional distress, money deficiency)
11:39 AM · 10/27/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 2 ↳ ↰ 7 ❤︎ 21
And just like that, the metaphorical hand of this stranger reached out in the dark, for hers.
That simple fact reframed the void between what Samira knew about him and what was yet unknown about “Jay”. Now, it could very well be that he, too, had built a picture of her in his mind. Still, the curtains had been drawn, the moment he made it apparent that he saw her, across the divide separating them. All of the sudden, there existed a very real possibility he was curious about her, too. About who she really was beyond the idea he had of her and the self she'd curated for herself alone.
She didn't open Twitter for two whole weeks after that.
Meanwhile, in the daylight hours, Samira kept knocking on doors. She'd not given up on finding a mentor. Every day she left her lectures to walk to different departments with her proposal in hand and come back empty handed. No, not interested. No, I'm just too busy. No, because I don't supervise first-years.
The rejections blurred together. She'd stopped counting.
Until she found Dr. Elena Vasquez. An epidemiologist in the Department of Emergency Medicine, mid-career and a quiet intensity that she’d recognized, instantly. She sat through one of her attempts to pitch her project, before asking four questions that cut straight to her weaknesses and then said, "meet me next week with the revisions."
The next time she’d read the revised proposal in absolute silence, nodded along, and mumbled, "I'll be your PI. But you’re going to need help with the clinical side. The data you're asking for— triage wait times, the pain scores, the discharge disposition— that’s in the ED records. You will need someone who knows the system... I'll see what I can do."
She made a call.
Three days later Samira sat across from Dr. Montgomery Adamson in his office, the Chief of the ED at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. She had done her research, she knew he was respected, maybe, even a little intimidating. She'd prepared herself for another dismissal. Instead, he looked at her across his desk and then muttered. "Elena's told me you want to comb through my charts."
"I do, sir," she said.
"You know most of them are illegible, right?"
"I've heard that."
"Still up to the challenge?"
"Yes."
He raised an eyebrow, chuckling, fondly. "You're going places Ms. Mohan." Samira felt the praise go to her head. He leaned forward. "Alright, I'll help you." After, though, Samira learned just how lucky she'd gotten with the start of things. How quick it'd all gone. Compared to how slow the process was, afterwards.
Vasquez walked her through the IRB submission step by step. They drafted the protocol together— the inclusion, the exclusion criteria, variable lists, the statistical models she'd need to run. As if there wasn't enough on her plate, greedy as she often could get, Samira completed the CITI research ethics training, the HIPAA compliance modules and endless forms that seemed to multiply overnight and her myriad of coursework, and lectures. She learned the language of institutional approval, the phrasing required to justify a waiver for retrospective data.
By mid-November, they had it ready. But the IRB review took six fucking weeks.
During those weeks she spent her nights in the library or her apartment, back on Twitter, waiting for notifications. She hadn't tweeted anything and barely retweeted things but the likes kept coming. Not often but enough. Enough that she’d started to see a pattern. She was pretty sure he liked her replies only whenever she was sharp, self aware and the right amount of sarcastic. She’d never expected a reply. Not so early. Not at all.
But then the first week of December, he did.
← Tweet
Jay (⋮)
@jaywalksalone
I’m currently reading a book all about anti-gravity.
It’s hard to put down.
05:59 PM · 12/03/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 3 ↳ ↰ 14 ❤︎ 32
_______________________________________
Mir @mostlymir · 5 m (⋮)
Replying to @jaywalksalone
Why are you like this?
06:10 PM · 12/03/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 1 ↳ ↰ 00 ❤︎ 1
Jay@jaywalksalone · 1 m (⋮)
Replying to @mostlymir
06:16 PM · 12/03/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 00 ↳ ↰ 00 ❤︎ 1
She stared at it, blinked. Shock gave way to this strange, illogical flutter in her gut. "Get a grip," she’d told herself. "You don't even know this person."
It was just a GIF, nothing else— not even a text response. A digital shrug. On the surface, it might've even seemed a refusal to engage, no better than lazily double tapping on her response. But it wasn't that. It was him reaching out. Acknowledging her, saying I see you.
At the end of the day, that was the only thing Samira still loved about social media, even as it fought a losing battle to outweigh all of its rot— the wasted hours, the mindless scroll and its echo chamber quality giving terrible people free rein for their awful takes. It had these moments.
Moments where it didn't feel like an echo chamber at all. But a crowded room full of people, stuck inside their own little bubbles, who every now and then bumped into each other. Comically. Sometimes purposely, yes. Most times, though, entirely by accident.
Looking up to see someone staring right back.
She locked her phone, set it down and picked it up again. Unlocked it. Watched GIF loop one more time.
She scrolled to her own reply and read it again. Cringing a little at how aggressive it sounded without context. But he had understood. He met her where she was, and then matched her energy. More than anything that was what made her chest feel tight in a way she did not have words for.
In the end, she settled on a simple like.
She didn't want to seem eager, didn't want to break what fragile thing had been established. Instead she let herself sit with it— Feel the small, ridiculous joy of being seen by this stranger.
Even as she tried to focus on reading, even when she was having dinner, when she turned off the lights and laid in bed, the flutter remained. It felt like being sixteen again, waiting for a crush to text back. Except it wasn't that.
It couldn't be that.
She didn't even know what he looked like.
She did not even know his name, his age. Anything about him, beyond the probably purposeful side he showed on the internet.
And still.
Two more weeks passed, as December stretched on cold, gray. Somehow she survived the first semester of medical school without falling apart. And yet, the IRB review was still dragging its feet.
Vasquez kept her updated: "Still waiting... Should be any day now."
She’d gone back to New Jersey, for the holidays. On New Year’s Eve Samira was with her mom and her family. She was glad to be back, she supposed, though, she was in no mood to even try to be social.
Then she saw a tweet of his.
← Tweet
Jay (⋮)
@jaywalksalone
2019 was… a year. I don't know how to feel about it yet. I think I need another year to process it. Happy New Year, I guess.
11:38 PM · 12/31/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 7 ↳ ↰ 19 ❤︎ 58
There was something in his words that made her pause— the exhaustion beneath the humor, the way he was trying to make sense of something he hadn't figured out yet.
She had felt that same impulse, seen it in her own mirror at the end of long nights, whenever she was too wired to perform okay-ness for anyone, even herself.
She typed: "Happy New Year, Jay."
She almost deleted it. “Seriously, Samira? What are you thinking?” It was too familiar. They'd exchanged perhaps a handful of replies and she was acting like they were old friends.
She didn't expect a response either.
He was probably with family, celebrating, being a person outside of a screen.
But her phone buzzed not a minute later.
Mir @mostlymir · 2 m (⋮)
Replying to @jaywalksalone
Happy New Year, Jay.
11:40 PM · 12/31/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 1 ↳ ↰ 00 ❤︎ 1
Jay@jaywalksalone · 1 m (⋮)
Replying to @mostlymir
Happy New Year, Mir.
11:41 PM · 12/31/2019 · Twitter for iPhone
💬 00 ↳ ↰ 00 ❤︎ 1
Why did she feel like she'd been holding her breath for so long and just now realized it? Mir. He’d said her name. It wasn't it, sure— but he'd taken that leap the same as her. Calling her by a name that meant her, in the only context that mattered there.
She lay in bed, later, while listening to the distant sounds of fireworks across her city, as she’d thought about him— the idea of him she built, likely to be shattered if she ever truly met him— and she let herself want it anyway.
Whatever it was.
She'd heard rumors lately, a sickness spreading in China. No one seemed too worried yet. But she had read enough to feel the prickle of unease and the sense that something was shifting just beneath the surface.
That her life, not just in one way, was about to change.