The girls in the game who healed me after the breakup

Two years ago, when I was still learning to sleep alone on the left side of the bed, I dove headfirst into a virtual reality video game I downloaded almost by inertia. It was called Blue Lily, and it was the kind of open world where nobody asked your age or your real name. You just chose an avatar, put on the visor, and let yourself be carried away through a city of floating towers where anyone could cross your path and start talking to you.

I had moved into a tiny apartment in the old part of Posadas, far from the memory of Camila, and I needed somewhere to escape without having to get dressed or look at myself in the mirror. The visor was perfect for that. I turned on the console, lay on my back in bed with the light off, and let the game world swallow me for hours.

There I met a couple more girls among the many who had fleetingly passed through my life since the breakup. All of them beautiful, although by then I already knew that in the game the word “beautiful” meant a well-designed avatar and a soft voice on the microphone. What was behind it didn’t always match the image, but I no longer cared.

The first of this new batch appeared one Thursday night, when I was sitting in a virtual square watching pixel rain fall. I was stressed, in no mood to write anything in the notepad where I kept a diary no one was ever going to read, bored and, above all, horny. And I was aware that combination of factors was a bad sign. The kind of bad sign that ends with your phone charging until dawn and your throat dry.

—Do you come around here often? —she wrote me privately.

Her avatar was a short lavender-haired girl, in a fitted black dress and knee-high boots. Her name was Talia, or so she told me. We both knew the name was as fake as the hair, but the game worked on that convention.

—More than I should —I replied.

—Alone?

—Always.

There was a pause of a few seconds. In the real world, I heard my own breathing inside the visor. I had been turned on before even logging in, and the conversation, still innocent, was already beginning to press against my chest.

—Hot? —she typed.

That word, on its own, was a code. It meant horny chat, 18+ roleplay, a conversation that would end with the two of us masturbating in silence in rooms we would never get to know. I had received that proposal so many times inside the game that I already had an automatic answer ready.

—Yes.

***

The Blue Lily private rooms were small sealed cubes, decorated like luxury hotel suites: heavy curtains, a huge bed with white silk sheets, a lit fireplace that didn’t heat anything. Talia chose the room and sent me the link. When I appeared inside, she was already sitting on the edge of the bed, legs crossed, wearing a smile her avatar replicated pretty well.

—You look more nervous than I am —she said, now speaking to me with her voice. Hers was husky, with a trace of a northern accent I couldn’t place.

—I always am at first —I admitted.

—Want me to lead?

—Please.

I closed my eyes behind the visor. In the apartment, alone, with only the bedside lamp on, I slid my hand beneath the waistband of my pajama pants. Talia began describing, with a calm that undid me, what her character was doing to me inside the room. How she knelt in front of me, how she held my wrists against the bed, how she slowly worked her way up the inside of my thighs with her tongue before she even touched me with her fingers.

It was ridiculous how good it felt.

Ridiculous because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that on the other side of the microphone there could be anyone. A woman my age, in her room. A student in a university dorm. A recent breakup like me. But the voice was unmistakably a woman’s, and the script she was writing into my ear had the exact cadence of someone who had already been with many others before me.

—I want to hear you —she asked me at one point.

—Wait —I murmured, biting my lip.

—No, now. Don’t stay quiet this time.

I didn’t stay quiet. And when I finished, gasping against the pillow, I heard that she had come with me too. She did it almost silently, except for a ragged breath and a whispered “fuck” at the end. Then she laughed, softly.

—Good night, stranger —she said, and disconnected without waiting for a reply.

I took off the visor, looked at the white ceiling of the apartment, and thought I’d be able to sleep for the first time in weeks.

***

After Talia came others. Renata, a Spanish woman who played from her balcony and laughed every time a neighbor coughed nearby. Mariel, who only spoke by writing and set up long scenes in which I was her student and she the private tutor taking advantage of the situation. And a Uruguayan who went by Lupe, who had found the game through a friend and who confessed to me, four encounters later, that I had been the first woman she had ever spoken to like that.

They all had one thing in common: they showed up at a particular moment in my night, offered themselves without beating around the bush, didn’t ask too much, and disappeared at dawn without demanding anything. And for me, who was relearning how to live with the empty space beside the pillow, that transience worked like medicine.

For my part, I was also aware that I was doing the same thing. That to them I was a provincial voice, with no real name, no face, promising a few hours and nothing more. The equation worked because we all signed, without saying it, the same contract: don’t ask, don’t look, don’t mix things together.

I almost never developed attachment to the women I had a conversation with or a single night with, either inside or outside the game. It was a curious thing about myself that I only learned while single: with formal partners or friends with benefits, yes, I got attached right away, sometimes too much. With strangers, on the other hand, there was an invisible wall I couldn’t explain where it had come from. Maybe it was a defense I built without realizing it when Camila left.

***

There was, however, one exception. One night, well into winter, a girl who went by Aitana entered my private room. She wasn’t especially talkative. Her avatar was simple, without flashy clothes, with an almost childlike haircut. She wrote me a single line.

—I saw your name on a list of mutual friends. Want to talk?

I accepted out of curiosity. Aitana didn’t want to move to a private room. She stayed with me in the fountain plaza, both of us seated on a stone bench that didn’t exist, looking at a sky that wasn’t a sky. And she started telling me things. That she was in Granada finishing a master’s degree. That she lived with a flatmate she was irrationally jealous of. That in the game she was looking for the same thing as everyone else, but that tonight she didn’t feel like pretending.

—I just wanted to talk to someone —she said.

—And why me?

—Because your voice sounds tired. I am too.

We talked until the visor started warning me about low battery. There was no sex, not that night. But when we said goodbye, she sent me a Telegram username with a “in case you ever want to tell me how it went.” And I, who had spent a whole year protecting myself from affection, saved it.

Aitana and I chatted for months. We started with little things: coffee photos, game screenshots, voice messages while one of us cooked and the other waited for sleep. And when what we had started to take another shape, we made it physical too, across the distance that separated my room in Posadas from her shared apartment in Granada. But that’s another story and, as usual, it was no longer with a stranger.

***

The Blue Lily thing was, now that I think about it, a constant process of trial and error. I learned, in that succession of anonymous girls, that desire doesn’t heal or get buried: it gets redirected, translated, learned to be handled. I learned I could ask for what I wanted without apologizing. That my voice, when it relaxed, had an effect on the other person that in real life I had never dared to test. And I learned, above all, that I didn’t need someone in my bed to feel accompanied, even if sometimes I preferred it.

The game shut down its servers a couple of years later. By then I almost never logged in. I had something with Aitana that resembled a relationship, even if it was long distance, and my visor nights had been replaced by video calls that ended the same way, but with a person whose breathing on the other end I actually cared to hear.

Sometimes, when I’m alone and boredom hits me in a very specific way, I open the game folder on my computer again. Not to go in; you can’t anymore. Just to look at the screenshots I saved without thinking much about it: a plaza with a fountain, a room with a fireplace, a lavender-haired avatar at the edge of a bed with white sheets. Each of those girls left me something and took something with them, without any of them ever really knowing what.

And every time I remember that period, I think the same thing: never underestimate what a broken woman can get from a stranger who asks nothing, a room that doesn’t exist, and a soft voice in her ear at three in the morning.