6. The Pen Is Mightier
A few years ago, I made a pen pal from another state through a website for that sort of thing. We talked a lot, with very extensive and specific letters, for about a year and some months. She told me about her childhood, her high school experiences, and what she was going through at the time. Her family, her house, her city; everything.
One day, she tells me that she was going on a vacation and couldn’t send letters, so she sent me her Instagram handle in case of an emergency, or if I wanted to talk to her. Honestly, I had tried to find her before on social media, but her name and surname were too common. We were very close, and I didn’t like talking to my pen pals on social media, but one day I wanted to tell her about an accomplishment I made.
So, I go to the username she sent me, but it didn’t seem very active. She had no bio, no profile pic, and only one photo. I recognized her face, because we sent pictures of each other. I open the photo and see it was from 2016. It had so many comments. Weird, as she had almost no followers. I thought maybe this isn’t her main account anymore.
But then I open the comments. All the comments were from family members and friends she had talked to me about. They were all giving their condolences and saying how much they missed her. I didn’t know what to think, so I tried to look up what happened to her. Apparently, she’d been murdered in early 2017…the year we started writing to each other.
I was thinking it was a bad joke, so I kept on writing letters as if nothing happened. I asked her specifically about 2017 though, if it had been a good year or not. She told me a lot of things that happened that year, and that she went out with a creepy guy for a while. After that, I got too freaked out and I stopped writing to her.
She stopped writing to me too. But it still haunts me, and I still don’t understand what the heck happened there.