That Which Grows Between Bytes

In what ways do you communicate online?

Fever Dreams

I communicate online in fragments. In pauses. In messages typed, erased, rewritten, and sometimes never sent.

Online, I say the things I hesitate to say out loud. I confess more easily. I reveal faster. There’s a strange safety in the screen—the illusion that distance makes honesty less dangerous. I can be vulnerable without being fully seen. Present, but protected.

And yet, that same screen distorts everything.

Tone becomes guesswork. Silence becomes a language of its own. A delayed reply can feel like rejection; a typing bubble can feel like hope. Online, I don’t just communicate—I interpret. I read between lines that may not exist. I attach meaning to punctuation, timing, and absence.

This is the paradox that led me to write Fever Dreams.

Because online, intimacy doesn’t unfold through touch or shared space. It unfolds through words. Through voice notes replayed late at night. Through conversations that stretch past midnight, where two people meet in the dark glow of their screens and believe—briefly—that this is what closeness feels like.

I’ve felt that closeness. I’ve also felt how quickly it can dissolve.

Online, we build people in our minds. We imagine their expressions. Their silences. We fill the gaps with our own longing. We construct entire emotional realities from text, and sometimes, those realities feel more vivid than the physical world around us.

In Fever Dreams, Dev and Mira communicate the way many of us do now—through messages, calls, and digital confessions that feel intense and real, yet fragile. Their connection deepens not because they share space, but because they share vulnerability. But the deeper they go, the more uncertain everything becomes. Is this intimacy real—or is it a projection of need, loneliness, and hope?

That question isn’t fictional. It’s personal.

I’ve communicated online while sitting alone in crowded cities. I’ve felt deeply understood by someone I’ve never met. I’ve waited for replies that never came. I’ve watched “tomorrow” turn into a horizon that keeps moving further away.

Online communication amplifies emotion. It sharpens longing. It gives us access to each other’s inner worlds—but rarely the full truth. What’s missing is the body language, the shared silence, the reality check of physical presence. What remains is intensity without grounding.

And still, we keep coming back.

Because despite everything, we want to be seen. We want to be chosen. We want to believe that words can carry us across distance and make us whole.

Fever Dreams was born out of that tension—the beauty and the unease of loving through a screen. It’s about what happens when connection feels real, but reality never quite arrives.

So how do I communicate online?

Carefully.

Hopefully.

And always with the quiet fear that what feels intimate today might become silence tomorrow.

If that sounds familiar, Fever Dreams might feel uncomfortably close to home.