Playing Dead. Photo by Maksim Samuilionak on Unsplash | by Hotoke | Beyond Lines

It wasn’t a slow fade. It was a guillotine.
It happened all at once. One shattering evening where his world didn’t just end; it was erased. She left, taking his future with her, and like a landslide, she took the ground beneath him too. His “found family”—the friends he thought were permanent, the ones who knew his traumas by heart—they didn’t just drift. They chose. And they didn’t choose him.
In twenty-four hours, he went from having everything to being a stranger in his own life.
Two weeks later, he was trying to exist in the aftershock. He sat in the breakroom, staring at a lukewarm coffee, forgetting for just ten seconds to hoist the heavy machinery of his smile into place. His eyes were dead—flat, unreflective surfaces holding back a tsunami.
“Jesus, man,” someone laughed, clapping him too hard on the shoulder. “Cheer up. You look like someone died. Stop with the resting bitch face, you’re killing the vibe.”
Someone did die, he wanted to scream. I did.
But the architecture slammed back into place instantly. The corrosive, painful smile.
“My bad,” he chuckled, the sound dry as ash. “Just tired.”
He went home to the silence that was now louder than any scream. He couldn’t bear to open their old games and see them in locked lobbies without him.
He lay on his bed in the dark and downloaded Delta Force Mobile. A fresh start. A place where no one knew what he had lost.
The “Create Character” screen popped up.
Enter Nickname.
He stared at the blinking cursor. He couldn’t use his old handle—that belonged to a guy who had friends. He couldn’t use his real name—that felt too heavy.
He typed: Hotoke.
To anyone else, it just looked like a cool, edgy Japanese gamertag.
Only he knew what it really meant.
Hotoke. The deceased. A dead person.
It was the only honest thing he had left. He had named himself after his own ghost.
He loaded into a match, auto-filled into a squad of three. Immediately, their voices filled his headset—laughing, using real names, clearly friends playing in the same room somewhere far away. They didn’t even say hello to him.
He played like a demon. He was a ghost in their squad, just a fourth body they ignored, but he carried them. He had to; if he stopped focusing, the silence would win.
The match ended. “VICTORY” flashed across his small screen, followed by his banner:
MVP: Hotoke
Score: 24 Kills / 0 Deaths
Adrenaline spiked for half a second. His thumb instinctively moved to screenshot it. He wanted to send it to her, to the group chat, with a caption like “New game, who dis?”
He froze. The realization hit harder than any bullet in the game.
There was no group chat. There was no her.
He was the MVP of a game no one knew he was playing, proud of a victory that meant absolutely nothing.
He looked at the name on the screen. Hotoke.
Dead person.
“Fits,” he whispered, his voice cracking in the empty room.
He closed the app. The screen went black, reflecting his own face back at him in the dark. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He just stared at the ghost in the glass and whispered the only truth he had left:
“I don’t know how to keep doing this.”
No one answered.