Next Stranger

Cindy told herself she was only going to stay for five minutes.

Five minutes was harmless. Five minutes was barely a decision. Five minutes was the amount of time a person spent waiting for water to boil, scrolling through restaurant reviews, standing at the door after coming home because removing shoes felt like too much commitment. Five minutes could be explained away as curiosity. It did not require a confession. It did not deserve judgment.

At 2:03 a.m., she sat in the blue-white glow of her laptop and made this agreement with herself as if she were someone who still kept agreements well.

The apartment was dark around her. Not fully dark, because Jakarta never allowed darkness to be complete. City light came through the balcony glass in broken pieces: amber from the street, red from a tower crane, white from cars moving too late along the road below. Rain had softened everything outside until the buildings looked less built than remembered. Drops clung to the glass and slid down slowly, merging, separating, leaving thin bright tracks behind.

Cindy had not turned on the ceiling light. She did not want the room to know what she was doing.

On the desk beside the laptop, the wedding folder sat closed. She had moved it there earlier with the serious intention of reviewing the revised invitation layout, but after opening the file and seeing her name beside Adrian’s again, she had shut it. Not because she regretted the name. Not because the sight was wrong. That was the cruelty of it: the sight was not wrong. The font was elegant, the spacing balanced, the date correct, the future respectable.

Still, something in her chest had tightened.

Adrian had texted at midnight.

Adrian: Don’t overwork the wedding stuff tonight. It will still exist tomorrow. Unfortunately. Jangan terlalu memaksakan urusan wedding malam ini. Besok masih ada. Sayangnya.

She had smiled when she read it.

Then he sent another.

Adrian: Also drink water, not anxiety. Dan minum air, bukan kecemasan.

Cindy had replied with a laughing emoji and a promise she had only half-kept. The glass of water beside her was empty now. The anxiety remained.

The browser page waited.

Omegle was ugly in the way old internet things were ugly—plain buttons, blunt warnings, no softness, no attempt at emotional design. It did not know she was engaged. It did not know she had once loved a man named Farid who could turn strangers into almost-friends during a five-minute wait outside a pharmacy. It did not know she had blocked him everywhere, then spent months still finding him in weather, tea, cats, and the quiet second before sleep.

The blue button said Start.

Cindy rested her fingers on the trackpad.

“Five minutes,” she whispered.

The apartment listened and judged nothing.

She clicked.

The camera opened, and her own face appeared for a brief second before the first stranger connected. Cindy flinched at herself. Long hair over one shoulder. Loose grey shirt. Bare face. Eyes tired enough to look honest.

She angled the laptop slightly lower, then immediately felt stupid for caring.

The screen flickered.

A boy appeared.

He was maybe seventeen, maybe twenty, wearing a headset too large for his head and sitting so close to the camera that Cindy could see only his forehead, nose, and one suspicious eye. Behind him, colored LED lights flashed violently against a wall covered in posters.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

The question was normal. Too normal. It required a small biography. City, country, age, reason for being awake. Cindy panicked with the quiet speed of someone who had never truly wanted to be asked anything at all.

She clicked Next.

The boy vanished.

Her room returned to the small loading screen.

Cindy exhaled.

“Very brave,” she murmured to herself. “Amazing progress.”

The next stranger was a black screen with microphone static.

Next.

A man eating cereal from a mixing bowl.

Next.

Two girls sharing a chair, both wearing face masks and waving as if they were hosting a live broadcast.

“Hi!” one of them shouted.

Cindy almost laughed. “Hi.”

“Are you married?” the other asked immediately.

The question struck the wrong place with such absurd precision that Cindy froze.

The first girl slapped her friend’s arm. “Why would you ask that?”

“Because she looks like she has adult sadness.”

Cindy clicked Next.

The screen returned to black.

Adult sadness.

She covered her mouth with one hand, and this time she did laugh. Quietly. Helplessly. The sound slipped into the dark apartment and dissolved before it could become anything too large.

Adult sadness.

Maybe that was what she had now. Not heartbreak. Not tragedy. Something less glamorous and more difficult to explain. Adult sadness was attending food tastings, replying to mothers, choosing invitation paper, loving someone kind, missing someone gone, and still needing to pay electricity bills before the due date.

Her laugh faded.

The next stranger loaded slowly.

Cindy leaned closer.

---

Across the city, Farid had also told himself five minutes.

He did not whisper it aloud because Momo was asleep behind him, and saying unreasonable things in front of a cat gave the cat too much power. But he thought it with the same false authority Cindy had used, sitting at his desk with a laptop open, rain tapping at the window, and a cup of chamomile tea cooling beside his hand.

The tea tasted terrible.

He drank it anyway.

Bunda had gone to bed hours ago after reminding him twice that Saturday did not mean he could destroy his sleep schedule like a university student during exam week. Farid had promised he would sleep soon. The promise had felt true when he made it. Most lies did.

Now it was past two, and his room existed in that strange hour where everything ordinary seemed slightly removed from itself. The desk lamp was off. The laptop glow sharpened the edges of his hands. His work document sat minimized at the bottom of the screen, ignored after twenty minutes of pretending. The folded prayer mat on the chair cast a dark shape against the wall. The rain outside moved steadily enough to make the world feel enclosed.

Behind him, Momo slept on the sofa with one paw hooked into the new cover, as if even unconscious he remained committed to destruction.

Farid had opened Omegle partly because of memory and partly because of exhaustion.

Cindy had once called it a digital haunted house. He remembered the exact way she said it—eyebrows drawn, mouth serious, as if warning him about a moral hazard rather than a website.

At the time, he had teased her.

“Not everyone online is a ghost,” he had said.

She had folded her arms. “That is exactly what a ghost would say.”

Now, years later, the site glowed on his laptop like a dare.

Farid moved the cursor over Start.

He did not know what he wanted.

That was the most honest part.

Not a friend. Not advice. Not flirtation. Definitely not Cindy. He was not looking for her. He knew better than to look for someone who had chosen absence so thoroughly. He wanted only noise without history. A face that would not soften when he said he was fine. A conversation that could end without anyone being harmed.

Five minutes.

He clicked.

The first stranger appeared in a burst of pixels: a boy eating instant noodles, hair damp, hoodie pulled up, steam fogging the bottom of his webcam.

The boy squinted at Farid. “Bro, you look sad.”

Farid blinked.

The directness was so rude it almost felt holy.

“Hello to you too.”

The boy slurped noodles. “Am I wrong?”

Farid looked at the small preview of his own face in the corner. Tired eyes. Slight stubble. Hair refusing order. Maybe the boy had a point.

“Yes,” he said.

The boy nodded with complete lack of belief. “Okay, sad bro.”

Farid clicked Next.

He laughed after the boy disappeared.

The laugh startled him. It sounded rusty, but not false. He leaned back, rubbed one hand over his mouth, and looked toward Momo.

“Sad bro,” he repeated quietly.

Momo snored.

“Thank you for the support.”

The next stranger was only a ceiling fan turning slowly in a room with green walls.

Next.

A man in headphones played guitar with more feeling than skill. Farid listened for half a minute because effort deserved respect. The man sang one line badly, closed his eyes with great passion, and missed three chords in a row. Farid clicked Next with a whispered apology.

A woman in a dorm room asked his favorite movie.

Farid hesitated too long.

His favorite movie had become tangled with Cindy by accident, as too many harmless things had. They had watched it during a rainy date when the cinema was too cold and Cindy fell asleep halfway through, her head tipping toward his shoulder in small surrender. Afterward she insisted she had heard “the emotional essence” of the film despite missing most of the plot. Farid had teased her for weeks. She had threatened to rewatch it without him and then never did because, as she said, “Some movies are better as failed attempts.”

The dorm room woman waited.

Farid clicked Next.

His reflection returned in the loading screen.

“Coward,” he muttered.

He drank more tea and grimaced.

---

Cindy’s next stranger was an older woman smoking near an open kitchen window.

For one strange second, Cindy thought it might be the woman from the other night, the one who had told her to cry tomorrow because morning had better lighting. But this woman’s kitchen was different, tiled in blue, and she spoke in Spanish too quickly for Cindy to understand. Cindy smiled awkwardly. The woman lifted her cigarette in a gesture that might have been greeting or farewell, then disconnected.

The screen reset.

Rain touched the balcony glass.

Cindy looked at the clock.

2:12 a.m.

She had already exceeded five minutes.

“Okay,” she said. “Last one.”

She clicked Next.

A man appeared, middle-aged, sitting in what looked like a hotel room. He glanced at her and smiled too widely.

Cindy clicked Next before he spoke.

A black screen.

Next.

Someone’s cat walked directly across the camera, tail high, body filling the entire frame. Cindy sat up.

“Oh,” she whispered.

The cat was not orange. It was black and white, slimmer than Momo, with the arrogant elegance of a creature who knew it was being watched. Behind it, a voice shouted in English, “Mittens, move!”

Cindy laughed.

The cat sat in front of the camera and began cleaning one paw with intense disrespect.

“Momo would do that,” she said under her breath.

The stranger behind the cat laughed. “You have a cat?”

Cindy’s smile softened before she could stop it.

“No,” she said.

Then, after a pause, because strangers were supposed to be easy, she added, “Someone I knew did.” / “Seseorang yang dulu kukenal punya.”

The stranger leaned around the cat. A young woman, maybe in her twenties, appeared partially on screen. “Past tense?”

Cindy should have clicked Next.

She did not.

“Yeah,” Cindy said. “Past tense.”

The young woman’s expression changed, not with pity exactly, but recognition. “Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“What was the cat’s name?”

Cindy looked at the black-and-white tail still blocking half the screen.

“Momo.”

“That is a very round name.”

Cindy laughed softly. “He is a very round cat.”

“Orange?”

Cindy blinked. “How did you know?”

“All cats named Momo are either orange or chaos.”

“He is both.”

The stranger laughed.

For a few seconds, the conversation became harmlessly alive. Cats. Furniture damage. The absurd dignity of animals who contributed nothing financially and yet ruled entire households. The woman told Cindy that Mittens had once knocked a glass of water into her laptop and then slept on the repair bill. Cindy told her Momo used to scratch the sofa while looking directly at people, which the stranger agreed was “psychological warfare.”

Then the woman asked, “Do you miss the cat or the person?”

Cindy’s smile faded.

The question had no cruelty in it. That was why it hurt.

Mittens meowed offscreen.

Cindy looked down at her hands. Her nails were unpainted. During the dress fitting, Melissa had told her she should start thinking about bridal nail colors. Cindy had nodded as if nails did not feel like one choice too many.

“Both,” she said.

The stranger did not answer immediately.

Then she said, “That sucks.”

Cindy looked up.

The simplicity loosened something in her. No advice. No poetry. No careful framing. Just that sucks.

“Yes,” Cindy said. “It does.”

The connection flickered.

Mittens disappeared.

The young woman waved quickly. “Good luck with both ghosts.”

Then she was gone.

Cindy stared at the empty loading screen.

Both ghosts.

She sat back slowly, folding her arms around herself.

Five minutes had become twenty.

She should stop now. She had taken what she came for, whatever that was. A laugh. A small confession to someone who would never use it. Proof that strangers could hold one sentence and leave without asking for the whole story.

She moved the cursor toward Stop.

Then paused.

On the desk, her phone lit up silently.

Adrian.

The message preview appeared.

Adrian: Hope you managed to sleep. If not, don’t bully yourself too much. Tomorrow still counts.

Cindy’s throat tightened.

He had sent it ten minutes ago.

She picked up the phone, read the message again, and felt the complicated ache of being cared for by someone who deserved an easier woman.

She typed:

Cindy: Still awake. But I drank water.

Then she hesitated.

Too little? Too honest? Not honest enough?

Adrian replied before she could decide whether to add more.

Adrian: That is progress. Sleep when you can. I’m proud of small victories.

Cindy closed her eyes.

Small victories.

She placed the phone down carefully.

Then, with a guilt she could not fully justify and a loneliness she could not fully deny, she clicked Next.

---

Farid lasted longer than five minutes because the strangers kept being strange enough to postpone self-awareness.

A man showed him a collection of miniature cars for no reason. Farid admired them because he was raised properly, even online. A girl asked him to choose between two nail polish colors. He chose the darker one and was told he had “divorced uncle energy,” which he accepted with dignity. A blank screen asked in typed text whether he believed people could meet again by fate.

Farid did not answer.

He clicked Next.

The question remained in his chest after the screen changed.

Fate was a word people used generously when things worked out and suspiciously when they did not. Farid had believed in qadr all his life, but not in the cheap way people sometimes used it to decorate coincidences. He believed in decree, in effort, in doors opening and closing according to wisdom larger than his sight. But he had also learned that people could hide cowardice behind destiny and call it surrender. They could refuse to choose, refuse to speak, refuse to fight, then say perhaps it was not meant to be.

He did not want to do that.

Not with Cindy.

They had chosen, both of them. Painfully. Imperfectly. Out of fear and love and pressure and faith and exhaustion. If there was fate in it, it had moved through their choices, not around them.

The next stranger loaded: a man lying in bed under a blanket, face half-hidden.

“Can’t sleep?” the man asked.

Farid smiled faintly. “Apparently not.”

“Same.”

Neither spoke for a moment.

The man said, “My ex got married today.”

Farid went still.

The stranger laughed softly without humor. “Sorry. Too much?”

Farid looked at the dark shape of his own reflection in the laptop frame.

“No,” he said. “Not too much.”

“You ever had that?”

“Not exactly.”

“Good. Don’t recommend.”

Farid swallowed.

The man’s face remained half-shadowed, anonymous enough to become anyone and no one. Maybe that was why Farid answered.

“She’s getting married soon,” he said.

The stranger was quiet.

Then: “You still love her?”

Farid’s hand tightened on the cup.

He had avoided that sentence for months because every version of it was inaccurate. Love, after ending, did not remain in one form. It became concern, memory, resentment, prayer, habit, ache, gratitude, shame. Some days it felt alive. Some days it felt like something preserved in glass. Some days he did not know whether he missed Cindy or the person he had been when loving her seemed allowed.

The stranger waited.

Farid let out a slow breath.

“I still want her to be okay,” he said.

The man nodded as if that answered more than the question.

“Worst kind,” he said.

Farid’s mouth curved sadly. “Maybe.”

“At least if you hate them, you get energy.”

“I don’t hate her.”

“Then you’re doomed to become emotionally mature.”

Farid gave a short laugh.

The stranger smiled, then coughed. “Sorry.”

“No. You’re right.”

“My condolences.”

The connection froze, broke into squares, then returned.

Farid looked toward the sofa. Momo had rolled onto his back, mouth slightly open, existing with shameless peace.

The stranger said, “I hope she’s kind about it.”

Farid looked back at the screen.

“She is,” he said.

That was the hardest truth.

The stranger nodded once.

Then the connection dropped.

Farid sat in the quiet aftermath.

The room seemed dimmer now, the rain more intimate against the window. His tea had gone lukewarm. He drank it anyway and made the same face Cindy used to make when medicine tasted too honest.

He almost heard her laugh.

Farid moved the cursor toward Stop.

Enough.

He had spoken to a stranger. He had not died. He had not been saved. The night could end with that modest achievement.

But just as he reached for the button, Momo stretched behind him and released a small, dramatic sound, half yawn, half complaint.

Farid turned. “What?”

Momo stared back as if offended by the question.

“You want me to stop?”

The cat blinked.

“That means yes or judgment?”

Momo tucked his paw under his chest and looked away.

Farid sighed. “Fine. Last one.”

He clicked Next.

---

Cindy’s next connection took too long.

The loading icon spun.

She waited, fingers curled lightly near the trackpad.

For some reason, her heart began to beat harder.

It was ridiculous. A technical delay was not an omen. A slow connection was not a story. The internet did not understand timing. It broke during meetings, froze during important calls, and loaded videos only after the emotional moment had passed. It was not capable of cruelty with intention.

Still, Cindy felt something shift in the room.

The rain seemed quieter. Or perhaps she had stopped hearing it. The city lights blurred behind her reflection on the screen. She could see herself faintly layered over the blank loading window: a woman in an oversized shirt, one hand near her mouth, eyes too awake.

She thought of Adrian’s message.

Small victories.

She thought of Lia’s warning.

Choose the one that bleeds least.

She thought of Farid outside the pharmacy years ago, making friends with a security guard while rain fell around them. Farid saying strangers were only slightly less strangers after a conversation. Farid laughing when she called Omegle a digital haunted house.

Maybe this was the haunted house.

Maybe ghosts did not always appear as white figures in hallways. Maybe they appeared as habits, inside jokes, remembered voices, names you did not type but still saw in blank spaces. Maybe Cindy had been walking through rooms full of ghosts for months and pretending they were furniture.

The loading icon spun again.

She whispered, “Come on.”

Then immediately wished she had not, because longing had a way of disguising itself as impatience.

The screen flickered.

A room appeared, blurred at first.

Dark background. Cool light. A shape of someone seated close to the camera.

For half a second, Cindy only registered details.

A desk. A cup. A dim window with rain on it. A folded prayer mat on a chair.

Then the face sharpened.

Her breath stopped.

---

Farid saw Cindy in fragments before he understood her as whole.

First, the light: blue against her face, the same late-night glow that made everyone look a little haunted.

Then hair over one shoulder.

Then the white of her shirt.

Then her eyes.

He did not move.

His hand stayed on the trackpad, cursor hovering near Next.

The mind refused at first. It offered other explanations with desperate politeness. Someone similar. A coincidence of features. A lagged image from memory. A punishment created by bad tea and worse sleep.

But the woman on the screen stared back with Cindy’s exact stunned stillness.

Her lips parted.

No sound came.

Farid could see the room behind her now. A small lamp. A desk. The edge of a mug. Rain on glass. He had never been in that apartment, not properly, but he knew the way Cindy arranged herself in rooms. How she sat too straight when startled. How one hand lifted toward her mouth and stopped halfway, as if even shock had to ask permission.

Cindy.

The name opened inside him like a door he had not touched in months.

Behind Farid, Momo shifted on the sofa. The movement drew Cindy’s eyes past his shoulder for a fraction of a second. He saw recognition flicker there too—not only of him, but of the life around him. The sofa. The room. Perhaps the cat. Proof that the screen had not invented him. Proof that he was not a stranger assembled by grief.

Farid’s throat dried.

He could disconnect.

So could she.

The button waited beneath his finger, blue and merciful.

Next.

It had sent away dozens of strangers tonight. It could send away one old love. It could protect both of them. It could preserve the silence they had built with so much pain and discipline. One click, and the universe would pretend it had not made this mistake.

Cindy did not click.

Neither did he.

The connection flickered once, pixelating her face into small squares. For a breath, Farid thought the internet might rescue them by failing. Then the image returned clearer than before.

Cindy stared at him.

Her eyes were wide, but not frightened exactly. Hurt, yes. Shocked. Softened in a way that made him want to look away for both their sakes.

Farid realized he was barely breathing.

He inhaled.

The air tasted of cooled chamomile tea and rain.

---

Cindy’s first instinct was to close the laptop.

Not click Next. Not disconnect politely. Physically close the laptop, cut the light, plunge the room into darkness, and sit there until her heartbeat accepted that impossible things could end if you refused to look at them.

Her hand did not move.

Farid was on the screen.

Not a photo. Not a remembered face. Not Dimas saying he was trying. Farid, alive in blue light, tired and real, sitting in the room she had once known through calls and photos and evenings when Momo screamed in the background for no reason. His hair was messier than she remembered. His jaw carried faint stubble. His eyes looked older, not in years but in weather.

Behind him, the sofa had a new dark cover.

Cindy noticed that before she could stop herself.

New cover.

Then, near the edge of the frame, an orange shape moved.

Momo.

The name struck so gently and so hard that Cindy nearly made a sound.

Momo was enormous now. Bigger than memory. Curled like a spoiled monarch against the sofa, one paw loose over the edge, fur glowing faintly in the laptop light. Cindy’s eyes burned immediately.

Of all the things to undo her, it was the cat.

Not the wedding. Not Farid’s face. Not the months of silence.

Momo.

She covered her mouth.

Farid saw. Of course he saw. He had always noticed the small betrayals of her face.

For several seconds, neither of them spoke.

The silence did not feel empty. It was crowded with every message unsent, every profile blocked, every update learned through someone else, every ordinary question that had become forbidden.

Are you eating?

Did you sleep?

Is Bunda okay?

Does Momo still scratch the sofa?

Are you happy?

Do you hate me?

Did we do the right thing?

The questions pressed against Cindy’s throat until she could barely swallow.

She looked at the Next button.

One click.

She could leave before the past became a conversation.

Adrian’s message sat on her phone beside the laptop.

Sleep when you can. I’m proud of small victories.

This was not a small victory.

This was a room opening beneath her feet.

Farid still did not speak. His restraint reached her through the screen with painful familiarity. He would let her leave if she wanted. Even now. Especially now. He would sit there and let her decide whether this accidental meeting deserved a voice.

That kindness nearly broke her.

Cindy lowered her hand from her mouth.

Her lips parted.

---

Farid saw the moment she chose not to run.

It was not dramatic. Only a small shift in her shoulders, a slow breath, her hand lowering from her mouth. But he knew it. He had watched Cindy make difficult decisions before. She became very still first. Then her eyes steadied. Then she did the thing that hurt, not because it stopped hurting, but because she had decided fear would not be the only author in the room.

His finger moved away from the trackpad.

The cursor remained near Next, useless now.

Outside, rain strengthened against the window. A motorcycle passed somewhere below. In the apartment, pipes clicked softly. Behind him, Momo yawned with insulting volume.

Cindy’s eyes flicked toward the sound again, and something like a laugh trembled across her face before disappearing.

Farid almost smiled.

Almost.

The first word waited between them.

It should have been impossible to choose one. There were too many candidates. Hello. Sorry. Why are you here? Are you okay? I heard. Congratulations. I miss—

No.

Not that.

Never first.

Maybe never at all.

Farid swallowed.

His heart beat so hard he felt it in his hands.

But Cindy spoke before he could.

Softly.

Disbelievingly.

His name crossed the distance between their rooms.

“Farid?” / “Farid?”