Open to Receive.

DMs, nudes and loneliness.

It’s 2:47 a.m. and the phone screen blooms cold in the dark. A message glows at the top: “u up?” It arrives like a sonar ping in deep water—faint, searching, slightly absurd. And still, there’s a little thud in the chest. That old reflex. Someone is reaching. Or maybe just casting. The difference doesn’t always matter.

The direct message has become a kind of séance, a modern spell cast through glass. A line flung across silence, more signal than language. A DM isn’t really a message. It’s a question: Am I alone? Are you there? Will you look at me? And beneath that, deeper still: Can you touch me, somehow, across all this nothing?

There’s a strange kind of magic to sending nudes, one that’s almost holy in its vulnerability and its absurdity. You choose the light, the angle, the crop. You press send. You relinquish your image into someone else’s screen, someone else’s silence. It isn’t really about sex. Not always. It’s about proof. About being seen. About the trembling hope that someone, somewhere, might find your body worthy of return.

The logic of these exchanges is never linear. There is no guarantee of reply. You might be met with emojis, with heat, with hunger. Or nothing at all. Sometimes the only response is a message marked seen, and that small word hits harder than any rejection. There is a new vocabulary for absence now—left on read, ghosted, soft-blocked. Tiny ways to disappear someone without having to say goodbye. These aren’t heartbreaks in the traditional sense. They’re micro-abandonments. Small silences that echo louder than they should.

And yet we keep sending. Keep trying. Keep arranging ourselves like offerings. Not just for the promise of desire but for the possibility of contact. A nude can be a mirror held up to loneliness. An attempt to collapse the unbearable space between wanting and being wanted.

Sometimes there is tenderness. Sometimes there is joy. Sometimes the exchange feels like standing in the sun. You look at me. I look at you. For a moment we’re not just avatars or profiles or pixels. For a moment we’re real, and soft, and glowing.

But most of it lives in the in-between. The long scroll, the half-written replies, the quiet hours after a message sent out into nothing. We pretend we’re detached. We say, “it’s just for fun,” “it’s just a game.” But who are we kidding? We want to be chosen. We want someone to say, yes, you. Right now, you.

Loneliness isn’t just solitude. It’s the ache of being invisible, even in plain sight. And in that ache, the DM becomes a lifeline. A flare in the sky. A whisper against the dark: Are you awake? Will you hold this version of me, just for a little while?

We send, and we wait. We wait, and we scroll. And every so often, someone replies. The phone buzzes, and for a moment, the room isn’t quite so silent.