I was on Instagram when my world cracked.
Just a casual scroll. A five-minute break from rejection letters and microwaved noodles. But then... there she was.
My girlfriend, Toby.
Her arms wrapped around another woman.
Their foreheads pressed together, their lips caught in an intimate kiss that didn't belong to strangers or friends. No room for confusion.
And then the caption:
"With my baby boo. #foreverus #lovedoesntseegender #blessed"
My thumb froze mid-scroll. My chest hollowed in pain.
I zoomed in. Not because I doubted what I saw, but because part of me desperately hoped I was wrong. That the photo was old. A mistake. Or may be a prank.
But the mole on her chin was still there. That awful floral dress I once joked made her look like she got lost in a curtain aisle? Still there. That crooked smile was hers.
And then it hit. This wasn't just some random misunderstanding.
She was dating someone else. A woman. Publicly. Proudly.
And me? I was the footnote. The filler. The disposable character in her origin story. I wasn't the main character.
I was the side quest. The emotional filler episode in her coming-out arc.
I stared at the screen for a long time. I don't know how long. Could've been minutes. Could've been hours. The blood in my ears was too loud.
Then I called her.
She picked up on the third ring. Casual. Like she hadn't just shattered something in me.
"Hey," she said. Just that. Like nothing was wrong.
"I saw the post," I said. My voice was flat.
There was a long silence.
Then she exhaled, a soft sigh that somehow sounded like relief.
"Yeah," she said.
"That's all you have to say? 'Yeah'?"
She didn't answer right away. I heard the sound of her moving, maybe sitting down, maybe adjusting her guilt.
"I didn't know how to tell you," she finally said. "I didn't mean to hurt you, Lucien. I just... needed to figure things out."
"And I was what?" I asked. "A placeholder? A soft launch? Your practice Subject?"
She winced. I could hear it in the pause. "No. You were important to me. I cared about you."
"You cared about me while kissing someone else?"
"Toby," I said, voice low. "You could've told me the truth. You could've told me you were confused, or questioning, or whatever this is. But you let me believe in something that wasn't real."
"I was scared," she said. "And I didn't want to be alone, lonely, left out...."
I laughed, bitter and short. "So you used me so you wouldn't feel alone? That's real generous."
"Lucien-"
"No. Don't. Don't call me like that. You don't get that anymore. At least you should've told me you wanted to break up and be honest. Instead you had choose to cheat. I had high hope on you. "
I hung up.
AHHHHHHHHHH..."
Then I screamed. Into my pillow. Into the room. Into the goddamn walls. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't poetic. It just hurt. The pain of betrayal...
My neighbor banged on the wall. I didn't care and I'm dangerously close to giving myself a hernia.
I lay on the bed like a body waiting for chalk lines. The ceiling stared back, blank and judgmental of my pathetic soul.
My name's Lucien Chakma. Twenty-six. A writer. Day - dreamer. I've graduated in 2023, thinking I'd write the next bestselling novel. I imagined myself in a hip café, typing away on a rose-gold laptop, sipping overpriced coffee brewed with the tears of indie baristas. But reality had other plans.
Reality gave me bad Wi-Fi signal, a desk with one wobbly leg, and an income so low even mosquitoes wouldn't bite me out of pity. My diet consists of instant noodles, my sleep schedule is sponsored by anxiety, and my writing career is currently marinating in a broth of rejection emails.
And now officially a clown in a one-man circus of heartbreak.
We met online, because honestly, how else does someone like me meet anyone anymore? A socially anxious, financially unstable writer doesn't exactly stumble into love at a coffee shop or a bookstore. For people like me, love arrives quietly, hidden behind profile pictures and curated bios.
She messaged me first. Just a simple line: "Your bio made me smile." That smile, even through text, felt like sunlight breaking into a room I didn't realize had gone dark. Looking back, maybe I should've read more into how casually she said it... but I didn't. I was tired, a little heartsore, and truthfully… I wanted to believe someone could find something in me worth smiling about.
Our messages turned into voice notes, her laughter soft and unguarded, like something she didn't know I was already memorizing. The voice notes became phone calls, long ones, stretching past midnight, touching on everything and nothing. Then came the video calls. The first time I saw her... she was in her kitchen, hair pulled up, eyes tired but kind. And still, she smiled.
One evening, trying to make her laugh, I wore a Spider-Man suit on our call. For me, someone who barely stepped out of his comfort zone, it was practically a grand gesture. She laughed so hard she snorted, then said, "You're my knight in shining Spandex." I smiled and called her my favorite kind of chaos, because that's what she was. Beautiful, warm, unpredictable. The kind of person who made the world feel a little less cruel.
It was sweet. It was real. And in a quiet, unfamiliar way, it felt like home. The kind of comfort I hadn't known since childhood- since my mother's gentle hand on my forehead, tucking me in with soup and soft lullabies during a fever.
Maybe that's how it happens sometimes. Love doesn't always crash in like a storm. Sometimes it arrives like a whisper. And stays, or I believed so.
I gave her everything I had. Every piece I had left after the last person broke me. I wore a damn Spider-Man suit on a video call just to make her laugh. I memorized her coffee order. I told my parents. My mom started asking what kind of wedding she'd like. My dad actually smiled.
And all the while, I was just a detour on her road to self-discovery.
You know what the worst part is?
I'm not even angry that she's with a woman.
I'm angry she lied to me. She dragged me into something she didn't have the guts to be honest about. And when she was finally ready to be real... it wasn't with me. It was with someone else.
And somewhere in that spiral of betrayal, my broken brain whispered the dumbest, most unhinged wish I've ever made:
"I wish I was a mosquito. Just for one day. So I could bite her with dengue."
Not exactly the high road. But I didn't want justice. I wanted revenge. Small, stupid, satisfying revenge. Just enough pain to match the betrayal she left me with.
I said it out loud. That ridiculous, cursed sentence.
And the air shifted. A sharp sparkle burst above my bed like someone microwaved glitter.
Then she appeared.
A tiny woman? Or something like one!
Tulle skirt over ripped jeans. Glittered Crocs. Wings like crumpled cellophane. Her wand looked like a chopstick from a takeout place that had seen better days.
I sat up, stunned. "What the hell?"
"You wished," she said, tilting her head. "I deliver."
"You... what? Who are you?"
"Think of me as your fairy god-problem," she said. "You want mosquito powers. I grant mosquito powers."
"Are you drunk?"
"No, you are drunk. Are you backing out?"
I stared at her. The insanity of the moment clashed against the ache in my chest. Against Toby's kiss. That damn caption. The lie she let me live in.
"You're serious?" I asked.
She snapped her fingers. A moth fell from the ceiling, twitching.
"You have 24 hours. Be the bug. Get your bite. After that, you're human again. Slightly more tragic, slightly more itchy."
"Wait, no, I didn't actually mean..."
But it was too late.
My body folded, crunched, warped.
Bones disappeared. Limbs shortened. My mouth shrank into a straw. My eyes sharpened. I could see heat. Smell sweat. Taste perfume in the air.
I was small. I was airborne. I was a damn mosquito! Is this a dream, I screamed and only an annoying eeeeeeeeee- came out.
Aedes aegypti. Vector of rage. Prophet of petty justice.
My wings buzzed. The sound was high-pitched vengeance. My senses tingled. I could feel her. Toby. Somewhere in distance.
The fairy's voice echoed faintly.
"Go get her, dengue king."
So I did.
No more poems. No more patience. No more being the soft one in someone else's story.
Tonight, I will bite her.
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