It’s 2 AM. I can’t sleep. Her message is still on my phone.
“Good night, talk tomorrow ❤️”
She sent it three months ago. The night before she died.
I haven’t opened it. Not properly. I’ve read it through the notification a hundred times. But I haven’t tapped on it. Haven’t scrolled up. Haven’t disturbed it.
I’m afraid. If I open it, something will change. The notification will disappear. The badge will clear. And then what? Then it’s really over. Then she’s really gone.
This is foolish, I know. She’s already gone. A notification won’t bring her back. But my heart doesn’t understand logic. My heart just sees her name glowing on my screen at 2 AM and pretends, for a moment, that she might still reply.
The phone company doesn’t know she died. The messaging app doesn’t know. Technology keeps treating her like she exists. Her name still autocompletes when I type the first letter. Her contact still appears when I want to share something funny.
Sometimes I start typing to her. My fingers move before my brain remembers. Then I stop. Delete the message. Stare at the screen.
Who would receive it? Where would it go? Into the void, I suppose. Into whatever silence exists on the other side of death.
Her last message was ordinary. That’s what kills me. “Good night, talk tomorrow.” She thought tomorrow would come. She thought this was a comma, not a full stop. She didn’t know these would be the last words she’d ever send me.
If she had known, would she have written something different? Something profound? Something final?
Probably not. She wasn’t that kind of person. She would have laughed and said something silly. That was her way. Keep things light. Don’t make a fuss. Good night, talk tomorrow.
Except tomorrow never came. Not for her.
I scroll through our old messages sometimes. Months of conversation. Jokes. Complaints about work. Photos of food we ate. Links we shared. The small, stupid details of a friendship lived through screens.
Most of it is nothing. Trivial. Forgettable. But now every word feels important. Every emoji carries weight it was never meant to carry.
She sent a photo of her coffee once. Just a cup of coffee. Nothing special. Now I stare at that photo and try to remember: what was she thinking that morning? Was she happy? Did she know, somehow, that time was short?
Of course she didn’t know. Nobody knows. That’s the cruelty of it.
The timestamp on her last message says Tuesday, 9:47 PM. Such a specific time. Such an ordinary moment. The universe gave no warning. No special formatting. No signal that this message would be different from all the others.
I have developed strange habits. I’m careful not to swipe that notification away by accident. I handle my phone like it contains something fragile. Something sacred.
Other messages pile up around hers. The world keeps talking. Friends send jokes. News arrives. Life continues its chatter. But nothing touches her space. Her last words sit there, protected, preserved.
My friend asked me last week: “Why don’t you just read it? Open the conversation. Let it go.”
I couldn’t explain. How do you explain that a read notification feels like a second death? That clearing that badge feels like erasure? That keeping it unread is the last thing I can do for her?
Grief makes us strange. I know this.
At night, when my phone glows in the darkness, it feels like a candle. A vigil. A small light for someone who is no longer here.
I wonder what she would think. She would probably laugh at me. “It’s just a message,” she would say. “Don’t be dramatic.”
But it’s not just a message anymore. It’s the last piece of her that moves through the world. The last evidence that she thought of me, typed words for me, sent love across invisible networks on an ordinary Tuesday night.
The heart emoji haunts me most. That tiny red symbol. Did she think about it before adding it? Or was it habit, automatic, meaningless?
I choose to believe it meant something. I choose to believe she thought of me with affection in her last hours. This is probably foolish. But grief doesn’t care about probability.
What torments me is what I never replied. She said good night. I saw the message. I meant to respond. But I was tired. I thought: I’ll reply in the morning.
Morning came. She didn’t.
Now my reply exists only in imagination. All the things I would have said. Should have said. The conversation that ended mid-flight, like a bird shot from the sky.
Her message hangs there, waiting for an answer that will never come. A question extended into forever. Punctuation seeking completion in a silence that won’t break.
I think about digital ghosts a lot now. All these messages from people who are gone. Preserved on servers somewhere. Floating through the cloud. Their voices captured in text, frozen at moments they thought were ordinary.
Our ancestors left letters. Photographs. Physical things that could be held, could fade, could burn. We leave messages that might last forever. Notifications that glow long after we stop breathing.
Is this better? Worse? I don’t know. It’s just different. A new kind of haunting for a new kind of world.
Last night, I almost opened it. My thumb was right there. One tap and the notification would clear. The conversation would be just a conversation. Her last words would become just words.
I couldn’t do it. Not yet.
Maybe someday. Maybe when the grief softens. Maybe when I’m ready to let her message become memory instead of monument.
But not tonight. Tonight, I’ll let it glow. Let her name shine on my screen in the darkness. Let those seven words and the tiny red heart remind me that she was here. That she thought of me. That she said good night and meant to talk tomorrow.
The phone company will eventually close her account. The messages might disappear. Technology moves on. Servers get wiped. Nothing digital lasts forever, despite what we think.
But for now, she’s still there. Still sending. Still reaching across whatever void separates the living from the dead.
“Good night, talk tomorrow ❤️”
Good night, my friend. I’m sorry tomorrow never came.
But thank you for the heart. I’m keeping it. For as long as I can.
For as long as this phone remembers you.
Which, I’ve decided, will be forever.