An Instagram Story

 

     She was a famous influencer, he was an ordinary blue-collar worker.

     She had a million plus followers on Instagram, he had twelve.

     She was twenty-four, he was twenty-seven.

     He was one of her followers on Instagram and he religiously liked her posts and watched her stories, but he doubted if she even knew he existed.

     But he truly liked her.

     He would screen record all her videos on her Instagram Story and watch it repeatedly. She would dance, sometimes sing, or recite poems on her videos. She would also nonchalantly talk about the things she just bought, the books she had just read, the songs that made her happy, the food she just ate, or how she loved the sunlight permeating inside her room.

     He would watch them while he was at work, while he was at home eating lunch or dinner, he would watch them before he slept, he would watch them the moment he woke up and he would watch them while he ate breakfast.

     He would watch them while he commuted to work.

     He would watch them while he travelled home from the office.

     He would watch them whenever he was lonely.

     When he was hospitalized for a tumor in his head, he would watch them in his hospital bed.

     He watched them after his surgery.

     Sometimes, while watching all those recorded videos in his hospital room, he would hear the nurses and doctors converse just outside his room. 

    "The former patient there in that room,” he would hear a nurse tell her fellow nurses, “he loved to watch an influencer’s videos on his phone, but his surgery failed and he died and was cremated last month, and coincidentally, the popular influencer he liked, on the day he died, she suddenly decided to delete her Instagram account, she really didn’t know why she did it, it was just that she felt inexplicably sad and that she thought nobody would watch her Instagram videos anymore.”