I want my e-lit project to explore what happens to love when it exists mostly through screens. Not just the social media version, but the kind filled with missed calls, delayed responses, and the quiet anxiety of time zones that never quite line up. My idea centers around building an interactive fiction about a long-distance couple trying to survive the distance while still learning how to love each other in a digital world.
At the beginning of the experience, the reader would choose the characters’ love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, or gift-giving. These choices don’t just act as personality traits, they shape how the story unfolds. A character who values quality time might struggle more with distance than one who values words of affirmation. The story would unfold through text messages, voice memos, short poems, and shared music links. The reader wouldn’t just read the relationship; they’d participate in maintaining it.
Each chapter would present the reader with choices: Do you send a poem or a playlist? Do you wait to respond or call immediately? Do you confront immigration issues directly, or avoid them out of fear? These decisions lead the couple down different paths. Some endings might show diaspora love surviving systems designed to break it. Others might show how distance, lack of intimacy, or family pressure slowly tears them apart.
Visually and structurally, I imagine the project looking like a chat interface or message thread, where timestamps, loading dots, and unsent messages become part of the narrative something like “Hana Feels” or “Writers are not Strangers.” There would be moments of silence built into the story, blank spaces where users have to sit with the absence, simulating what long-distance actually feels like. Music and poetry would function as emotional artifacts, love letters in digital form, showing how intimacy adapts when touch isn’t possible.
This project matters to me as a person that had had to navigate a failed long-distance love, it isn’t just about romance. It’s also about borders, migration, cultural expectation, and emotional survival. By making it interactive, I want readers to feel the weight of choice, to understand that love online is not passive consumption, but active, fragile construction. Every decision becomes political. Every message becomes evidence of care or neglect. In the end, some relationships will survive. Others won’t. But either way, the reader walks away understanding that love, like electronic literature, is shaped by systems, interfaces, and the emotional code we choose to write within them.
