At 6:42 AM, the alarm rang.
Ishita jerked awake, heart thudding. The time didn’t make sense. Her alarm was always 6:30, never later. She squinted at the screen, thumb hovering—then the phone went black.
Battery: 0%. Dead.
“That’s weird,” she muttered.
She plugged it in. Fast charger. Thirty minutes, max. Enough.
The room felt oddly quiet, like sound had been wrapped in cotton. No traffic horns, no birds. Just the low hum of the AC. Ishita sat up, ran a hand through her hair, and tried to remember if she’d snoozed the alarm. Nothing came back clearly. Her head felt heavy, like she’d woken up after anesthesia.
She walked to the bathroom.
Warm water hit her shoulders. Steam rose. Normally, showers were planning sessions—What outfit today? Café shoot or balcony golden-hour? Reels or carousel?
Her life ran on those questions.
She was an Instagram celebrity. Or… she had been.
Followers in lakhs. Brands DM’ing daily. Comments flooding in before she even towel-dried her hair. Stardom tasted sweet, addictive. Her parents’ money made it easier—designer clothes, unique fits, international labels. Every day: shopping, clicking photos, posting, scrolling through love.
But today, under the water, nothing came.
No excitement. No urge.
Just a strange thought repeating again and again:
Why does this feel… borrowed?
She stayed in the shower too long. Forty-five minutes, maybe more. When she came out, the mirror looked wrong. Not distorted—just unfamiliar. Like she was seeing a cousin who looked exactly like her.
The phone buzzed.
Charged.
Relief washed over her. She wrapped her towel tight and walked to the dining table. The maids had already laid out coffee and bread omelette. Everything normal. Too normal.
She powered on the phone.
Her thumb hovered, already anticipating the dopamine hit.
Notifications usually exploded—Instagram hearts, comments, DMs, story reactions. Triple digits, minimum.
The screen loaded.
Nothing.
No vibration. No banners. No red dots.
She frowned. “Network issue?”
She switched airplane mode on. Off. Checked Wi-Fi. Full bars. WhatsApp messages loaded instantly—spam group forwards, family updates.
Instagram stayed silent.
A thin line of unease crawled up her spine.
She opened the app.
Refreshed.
Once. Twice.
Still nothing.
Her last photo loaded—a mirror selfie in a black cut-out dress, posted last night.
29 likes.
She laughed, a short sharp sound. “Okay, glitch.”
She tapped an older post. Then another.
Two-digit likes everywhere. No flood of comments. No fire emojis. No hearts.
Her fingers began to shake.
She opened her profile.
Follower count: 972.
The number sat there calmly, like it had always belonged.
Her breath caught.
“No. No no no.”
She refreshed again. Logged out. Logged back in.
972.
Her mind raced. Shadow ban? Hack? Algorithm glitch?
Then she scrolled down further.
Every post. Same story. Never more than a hundred likes. Ever.
Her chest tightened painfully, like something was pressing from the inside.
“A million,” she whispered. “I had a million.”
She opened her gallery. Thousands of screenshots—brand deals, milestone posts, “1M FAMILY ❤️” captions.
But something was off.
The screenshots… were blurry.
Not low resolution—incomplete. Like details refused to stay in focus when she stared too hard.
Her head started pounding.
She called Neha.
The phone rang twice.
“Hello?” Neha sounded sleepy, annoyed.
“Neha,” Ishita said quickly. “Something is wrong with my Instagram.”
“What happened?”
“All my followers are gone. I have only 972.”
There was a pause. Then a small laugh.
“Ishu… you’ve had around 900 followers since forever. What are you talking about?”
Her stomach dropped.
“No. No, that’s not true. I had a million. Everyone knows that.”
“Are you okay?” Neha asked carefully. “I have a million. One-point-one, actually. You were always trying to catch up, remember?”
Ishita’s ears rang.
“That’s not possible,” she said. “You never crossed a few hundred.”
Neha went quiet. Then her tone hardened.
“I think you’re projecting. I know you were jealous, but this is… weird.”
The call ended.
Ishita immediately opened Neha’s profile.
1.1M followers. Blue tick. Brand collaborations. Reels with millions of views.
Photos that felt… familiar.
Too familiar.
Same cafés. Same angles. Same poses Ishita remembered doing.
Her vision blurred.
She dropped the phone on the table.
“No,” she whispered. “This isn’t real.”
She contacted Instagram support. Automated replies. Then a human response:
Your account shows no unusual activity. No follower loss detected.
Her chest felt hollow now, like someone had scooped something out.
She called her mother.
The call barely connected before her mother snapped, “What is it now? I’m in a meeting.”
“Maa,” Ishita said, voice cracking. “Something is very wrong. My followers—”
“I don’t give a shit about your followers,” her mother cut in sharply. “We’ve told you for years to do something meaningful. Instead, all you do is buy clothes and chase validation online. We are fed up.”
The line went dead.
Ishita stared at the phone.
Her reflection in the black screen looked thinner. Less solid.
She tried to remember her childhood. School. College.
The memories came… patchy.
No friends. No achievements.
Only Instagram.
Always Instagram.
A thought slithered into her mind, cold and unwelcome:
What if the million followers were never real?
She shook her head violently. “No. They were real. They loved me.”
Her phone buzzed.
Notification.
From Neha’s post.
She opened it.
A photo uploaded minutes ago.
Neha, in a black cut-out dress. Mirror selfie. Same lighting. Same pose.
The caption read:
Late night vibes 🖤
The comments flooded in:
Queen
Obsessed
Unreal beauty
Ishita’s breath came in shallow gasps.
That was her dress.
She ran to her wardrobe. The hanger was empty.
She checked another outfit. Missing. Another. Gone.
Her room suddenly felt stripped, like a hotel after checkout.
She scrolled through Neha’s feed, faster now.
Every milestone post—“500K strong”, “1M FAMILY”—felt like pages torn from her own life and pasted somewhere else.
Her hands began typing furiously.
She commented on Neha’s photo:
Come back. Follow me.
No likes.
She commented again.
You know me. Please.
Nothing.
Her comments sank to the bottom, buried under thousands of hearts.
Her heart started pounding erratically.
“What did you do?” she whispered at the screen.
A message popped up.
DM from Neha.
Stop this. You’re scaring me.
Ishita typed back instantly.
You stole my life.
Three dots appeared.
Then disappeared.
Then Neha blocked her.
Ishita screamed.
The sound echoed strangely, like the room was larger than it should be.
She slid down to the floor, clutching her phone. Tears streamed down her face, dripping onto the screen.
Her profile refreshed automatically.
Followers: 968.
She wiped her eyes.
Refreshed again.
961.
Her breath hitched.
“No. Please.”
Each refresh dropped the number further.
- 953
- 945
- 930
It was like watching herself dissolve.
Her name on the profile dimmed slightly, the text losing sharpness.
She opened her photos.
They were fading.
Not deleting—blurring, like memories after a long time.
Her body felt light now. Too light. Her fingers looked semi-transparent at the edges.
A final notification appeared.
Your account has been inactive for a long time.
Inactive?
“I post every day,” she sobbed.
But the app didn’t respond.
She felt dizzy. The room tilted.
Her phone slipped from her fingers and hit the floor.
The screen cracked.
On the broken glass, she saw a reflection.
Not herself.
A younger Ishita. Plain clothes. No makeup. Holding a phone nervously, staring at Neha across a college canteen table.
A memory snapped into place.
Neha showing her Instagram stats.
“I just hit ten thousand,” Neha had said, glowing.
Ishita smiling, clapping… while something dark twisted inside her.
Why her?
Why not me?
Another memory.
Late night. Ishita scrolling endlessly, imagining comments that weren’t there. Pretending likes. Living a life in her head where she mattered.
The world around her dissolved.
She wasn’t losing followers.
She was losing permission to exist.
Because she never existed the way she thought she did.
She had built a fantasy so strong, she stepped inside it.
And now reality was reclaiming its space.
The phone on the floor lit up one last time.
Her profile vanished.
Replaced by a simple message:
User not found.
Silence.
Elsewhere, Neha refreshed her feed, shivering for no reason she could explain.
For a brief second, she felt like someone was standing just behind her.
Watching.
Waiting for a follow back that would never come.