They Said...

They said we were a mismatch. A digital oddity. A Lithuanian storyteller, all ancient forests and whispered spells, and Jester, the king of quick wit and pixelated grins. From what I gathered through the digital grapevine, the whispers often started with a snort of disbelief, followed by a perfectly timed eye-roll. “*Her*? With *him*?” they’d scoff, as if the very notion was an affront to the natural order of things.

Online, the gossip mill churned with a ferocity that would make a witch’s cauldron boil over. People dissected our interactions like amateur pathologists, searching for a diagnosis. Was it a secret romance? A bizarre creative partnership? Or, as one particularly imaginative soul suggested in a comment thread that went on for days, was I some sort of magical influencer who’d ensnared the poor, unsuspecting Jester with my enchanted words? The sheer absurdity of it made me want to laugh, but also, a little, to weep. They saw the usernames, the avatars, the perfectly curated snippets of our lives, and they thought they knew. They thought they understood the delicate threads that bound us, woven not from shared geography or conventional circumstances, but from something far more elemental.

“Did you see what Agnes posted?” Jester’s voice, usually so bright and full of carefully modulated mirth, held a hint of something else when he sent me the screenshot. Agnes, bless her meddling heart, ran a popular fan page for local performers and had, with great fanfare, declared our collaboration “the most unlikely pairing since… well, since anything!” Her post was a masterpiece of passive aggression, peppered with question marks and thinly veiled concern for poor Jester’s sanity. “I mean, she’s all about the old gods and forests, and he’s… you know. Jester. Does he even *understand* what she’s talking about when she mentions the *laumės*?”