Connection: The Unconscious Muse (Short Story)

By Terra Marie Berta-Porcase

The battery icon in the top right corner of Clara’s phone had bled from a comforting yellow to an anxious, flashing red.

Five percent.

Clara Votelli let out a slow breath, the air whistling slightly through her teeth as she stared down at the screen. She was standing near the base of the arrivals escalator at Jacksonville International Airport, a liminal island of mass anonymity nestled deep in the city’s industrial Northside. The terminal was a cavern of fluorescent lighting, echoing with the rhythmic clatter of rolling suitcases and the garbled, robotic hum of PA announcements. It was loud, chaotic, and oddly comforting. It was one of the rare public spaces in Florida where Clara felt she could just exist. Here, she wasn’t “Miss V”, a public school teacher required to perform agreeable perfection. She wasn’t a political talking point. She was just another weary traveler waiting for a connection.

She smoothed down the front of her pastel green cardigan, a nervous habit, ensuring it draped perfectly over her nice floral dress and the black bike shorts peeking out beneath the hem. She smelled of vanilla lotion, dry shampoo, and the acrid, burnt-bean scent of terminal coffee drifting over from a nearby kiosk. Her thumb absently found the trans-flag fidget ring on her left hand, a gift her girlfriend Maya had mailed her two months ago on their 6 month anniversary. The same Maya that was currently on a plane and hurtling through the sky towards her. Clara twisted her precious ring  around and around, feeling the grounding metal cool against her skin.

She chided herself silently. She had spent an hour agonizing over her outfit this morning, desperate to look softly, effortlessly feminine, and in her panicked rush out the door, she had grabbed the cute, impractical purse. The one without her phone charger. The charger was currently sitting on her kitchen counter, likely being chewed on by her cat, Mr. Moo, the one with the little black and white prints on his coat that made him the littlest cow in the world.

Clara tapped her darkened phone screen, wincing as the backlight flared. She immediately dialed the brightness down to a sliver to conserve whatever juice was left.

Her lock screen illuminated: a blurry, radiant selfie of Maya, captured only a few hours ago but she had to keep it forever. Staring at the chaotic motion of someone vibrating with too much excitement to hold the camera steady. She was grinning fiercely in front of a sterile Dallas TSA checkpoint, her teeth flashing in an unapologetic, victorious smile. The harsh airport lighting caught the triumphant sparkle in her dark, intense eyes, which peered out from beneath the frayed brim of a patched-up protest beanie. It was a snapshot of pure, adrenaline-fueled trans joy—the immediate aftermath of handing an agent her brand-new, legally updated ID and being addressed as “Maya” without a second glance. Clara swiped up. Her home screen appeared, unobscured by apps. The drawing. A text banner dropped down from the top of the screen, momentarily covering the artwork.

[06/11/2026 09:23 am] Mayayayaya281: Air traffic is a nightmare. We’re circling. Don’t leave me!!

Clara smiled, a genuine, private thing that crinkled the corners of her eyes. She quickly typed back.

[06/11/2026 09:23 am] Clara-bear-a: I’m not going anywhere, I’ve been dreaming of this forever!

 And swiped the message away, her eyes settling back onto her home screen wallpaper.

Even now, years later, staring at the drawing made Clara’s breath catch in her throat. It was a red fox girl with a chaotic, beautiful mess of curly brown hair—the exact same stubborn, gravity-defying curl pattern Clara had spent an hour taming with handfuls of coconut-scented mousse that very morning. The digital brushstrokes captured the way the ringlets rebelled and coiled, a texture Clara knew intimately from spending more time hunched over her hairdryer’s diffuser than anywhere else in her apartment. Twin pointed ears, dusted in a soft russet orange and tipped in velvet black, poked through the heavy canopy of her hair. But it was the expression that always stole the air from Clara’s lungs. Her amber eyes were wide and wistful, catching an invisible, painted light as they gazed off into the distance. She was curled slightly inward, longing for something just out of frame, carrying the exact, heavy ache of yearning Clara had harbored in her own chest for twenty-eight years before finally setting it free.

The image pulled Clara backward, the sterile noise of the airport fading into the heavy, suffocating silence of 2020.

Back then, Clara hadn’t even had the vocabulary for her gender. She had just known the aching, heavy dysphoria that pressed down on her ribs every time she looked in the mirror. Trapped in the isolation of lockdown, she had built a sanctuary inside her own mind. She had closed her eyes and visualized her truest, rawest self—not the man she was pretending to be, but this fox girl. It was a deeply personal, furry-coded lifeline. Clara had seen the image so clearly, mapped every detail of the ears, the hair, the soft curve of the jaw, but her hands were useless with a pencil. It was an impossible, unfulfilled longing, a silent prayer she had simply exhaled out into the digital ether because she had nowhere else to put it.

And the ether had caught it.

Clara remembered the sheer, heart-stopping shock of scrolling through her feed 5 years  later and seeing her soul staring back at her. Maya, an artist halfway across the country, had somehow reached into the collective unconscious, grabbed Clara’s fragile, unspoken thought, and inked it into reality.

That impossible resonance had pulled Clara into an immediate, dizzying orbit. First, it was quietly stalking Maya’s main Bluesky account, absorbing every casual post and WIP sketch like a woman starved for connection. Then, inevitably, she stumbled upon Maya’s spicy alternate account, where the artist posted unapologetic, erotic pictures that made Clara blush furiously in the dark of her bedroom, her quiet admiration suddenly blooming into a heavy, desperate crush. From there, it was a rapid descent into Maya’s public Discord server, where Clara lurked in the digital shadows for weeks just to watch the way the artist interacted with her community—chaotic, funny, and fiercely protective. It took a month of this silent, breathless courtship before Clara finally gathered the nerve to do the bravest thing she had ever done. She opened a private DM, her hands shaking over her keyboard, and sent a terrified message.

[5/25/2025 11:24 PM] Clara-bear-a: This is going to sound crazy, but you drew exactly what was in my head. Not like plagiarism or anything like that I can’t draw for shit. But…it’s like you pulled it from my memory, that fox girl looks…identical to an idea I had nearly 5 years ago…

The reply had been almost instantaneous, a little digital ping that lit up Clara’s entire world and sent her heart into a frantic rhythm. 

[5/25/2025 11:26 PM] Mayayayaya281: Hiya! Thanks for reaching out. 5 years ago? You know…that’s when I started making sketches of that character…

That single, trembling tether had sparked an electric connection. Clara’s thumb traced the edge of her phone case as she remembered the slow, agonizingly beautiful build of their sapphic longing. The tentative text messages that evolved into hours-long, late-night voice calls. The profound realization that Maya’s loud, unapologetic bravery made Clara feel safe enough to drop her high-pitched, agreeable ‘teacher voice’ and just be her fry-heavy, authentic self. Even some days she’d prefer the silence. After a day of teaching and talking, sometimes her voice was shot, and she’d just listen to Maya talk for hours about whatever her current project was.

The screen in Clara’s hand abruptly dimmed, snapping her back to the fluorescent reality of the Jacksonville arrivals terminal. She tapped the glass, keeping it alive for just a second longer. The battery icon ticked down.

Four percent.

A knot of genuine panic tightened in Clara’s stomach. She spiraled for a second. What if her gate changes and I can’t check the flight status? What if she walks right past me? To ground herself, Clara took a sip from the cardboard cup she was holding. The bitter, scalding airport coffee burned its way down her throat, shocking her back into her body. She began to rapidly twist the trans-flag ring on her thumb again, feeling the smooth groove of the metal where Maya’s calloused fingers had undoubtedly held it before packing it into a mailer.

The number flipped again before her eyes.

Three percent.

Seeking one last hit of dopamine before her screen went entirely black, Clara opened Discord. She scrolled past her usual cringey puns in their general chat and opened her saved messages, the ones she re-read when the Florida of it all felt too oppressive. She found the specific exchange from a month ago, under a slightly different, much braver username in their private chats.

[10/14/2025 2:14 AM] Clara-bares-it-all: Okay…here’s me…

[10/14/2025 2:14 AM] Clara-bares-it-all: 😳 [Image Attachment]
[ 👀1] [🤤 1]

[10/14/2025 2:15 AM] Mayayayaya281: Que sexy eres 🥵🥵🥵🥵
[🩷 1]

[10/14/2025 2:16 AM] Mayayayaya281: Mierda😍 holy fuck. Girl, how are you this hot.
[🩷 1]
[10/14/2025 2:17 AM] Mayayayaya281: Mi belleza~ Pixels don’t do you justice. The lighting is all wrong. As an artist, I am legally obligated to tell you I need to study my muse in person. 😘
[🩷 1]

[10/14/2025 2:18 AM] Clara-bares-it-all: Oh really? Just to study the subject? Strictly professional? 

[10/14/2025 2:19 AM] Mayayayaya281: Extremely Professional, for a long long time 😈 I need to get a hands-on feel for the anatomy. really pin down the proportions. trace the canvas. It’s called dedication to the craft, Clara. I need to draw you better, and I can only do that with you right in front of me.
[🩷 1] [YES 2]

Clara let out a shaky, breathless laugh, her cheeks heating up at the memory of Maya’s raspy voice leaving a voice note right after that exchange, detailing exactly how she planned to ‘trace the canvas.’ She was proud of herself for understanding Maya’s spanish, albeit still having to think about it. Ever since their first interaction she had been practicing little bits of conversational spanish in her free time, in anticipation of today. A little notification shot up to remind her to do her daily language practice. No more time to practice, Votelli, she’ll be here soon… With a reluctant sigh, Clara locked her phone, finally letting the screen turn black to preserve the remaining sliver of life.

She looked up at the physical world. The terminal was a river of transitory crowds—families reuniting, businessmen power-walking, teenagers draped over their luggage. It reminded her of the city outside these doors. Jacksonville was the City of Seven Bridges. It was a sprawling, disjointed patchwork of isolated islands, thick swamps, and concrete, all desperately trying to connect across the wide, dividing currents of the St. Johns River.

The internet, Clara realized, wasn’t so different. It was a fragmented web where human connection was splintered, millions of people siloed in their own bedrooms, waiting for someone to build a bridge. 

Standing there amidst the crowd, Clara mused on the modern reality of the collective unconscious. How exactly did her fragile, deeply dysphoric thought manage to travel across the digital grid to land perfectly in the mind of a fierce, ink-stained activist in Texas? She pondered the strange, almost magical physics of the internet, this massive, invisible nervous system connecting billions of isolated minds. It isn’t just a network of fiber optics and servers; it’s a living web of desperate 3 AM searches, discarded blog posts, and silent hopes pulsing in the dark.

She thought about the beautiful, eerie side effects of this shared cognition: the sudden spikes of deja vu when scrolling through a stranger’s feed, the phantom nostalgia for a childhood bedroom she never lived in, and that uncanny, bone-deep resonance felt with someone a thousand miles away. She marveled at the idea that before this digital age, her lonely visualization would have simply withered away, a solitary secret swallowed by the heavy Florida humidity. 

Instead, the digital ether acted as a faithful custodian for her soul, carrying her rawest, unspoken hope safely through the chaotic noise of the web until Maya was ready to catch it, nurture it, and pull it into reality.

Before the screen could fully fade to black, a sharp vibration rattled against her palm. A new banner dropped down.

[06/11/2026 09:28 am] Mayayayaya281: Landed!!! Taxiing to the gate. I’m heading straight down to baggage claim and then to youuuuuuu. You know what to look for. 🩷 hot mexican girl in the denim jacket, dark hair.

Clara stared at the words, reading them once, twice, three times. A sudden, overwhelming swell of emotion rose in her chest, thick and absolute. The edges of her vision blurred. She inhaled sharply, tilting her head back toward the fluorescent ceiling and rapidly blinking the wetness away. 

Do not cry, she commanded herself. You spent forty-five minutes on PERFECT winged eyeliner. Hold it together, Votelli. She looked back down at her screen. The battery icon turned to a lethal, hollow sliver.

One percent.

Her thumbs flew across the keyboard, racing the dying battery.

[06/11/2026 09:28 am] Clara-bear-a: As dark as midnight, right? 

[🩷1]

[06/11/2026 09:28 am] Clara-bear-a: I’m right at the bottom of the escalator heading towards the parking garage. I’m here. I’ll always be here for you.

[🩷1]

She hit send. A tiny, gratifying swoosh sounded, and the little gray text beneath the message switched to Delivered.

Then, Clara made a conscious, terrifying choice. She didn’t wait to watch the phone die in her hands. She pressed the power button, plunging the screen into darkness, severing the digital tether herself, a connection to a piece of herself that mattered to her, that digital life she lived in that same moment, at every moment. She dropped the heavy rectangle of glass and metal into her impractical purse and let out a long, shaky sigh.

A wave of profound relief washed over her. She was disconnected. She was utterly, entirely alone in the physical world, untethered from the digital ether that had kept her safe for so long. Now, all she could do was wait.

As she stood there watching the steady stream of passengers flow down the escalator, Clara’s mind drifted back out into the abstract, wondering about the sheer, staggering magnitude of what was happening. She thought about her history of reaching out—how many times had she cast a desperate line into the dark, hoping someone, anyone, would pull back?

How many of her thoughts had found their way into the minds of others?

She thought back to the years before her transition, those agonizing nights spent staring at the ceiling, silently bargaining with a universe she didn’t fully believe in to let her wake up a girl. Had that desperate, unspoken ideation been entirely her own?

Or had she, in some subconscious synchronization, felt the echoing thoughts of a thousand other closeted trans women feeling the exact same ache at the exact same moment? 

Or perhaps she had been the one to incept the idea, broadcasting her inner, buried truth outward like a radio tower, an invisible frequency that washed over another trans woman in another city, helping her finally crack her egg.

It was a staggering, deeply queer realization. Trans women were not just existing on the internet; they were actively using it to weave a massive, intricate tapestry of survival. Through Discord servers, late-night gaming lobbies, and shared art on Bluesky, and massive amounts of memes and shitposts on all channels. They were casting out threads of fate in the dark, pulling on them until they formed a resilient, digital mycelial network. They found each other in the noise, forging a community built entirely on the radical act of being perceived correctly by a stranger thousands of miles away.

“Miss V?” The voice sliced through the terminal’s low, humming white noise, sharp and distinctly adolescent.

Clara froze. The profound, sprawling architecture of her inner world collapsed in a millisecond, replaced by the stark, fluorescent reality of the airport. She turned, and there, standing near the baggage claim carousels, was Lily. Lily was a sophomore in Clara’s honors English class, a bright, energetic white girl currently sporting a fresh summer sunburn and a messy ponytail. She was flanked by her mother, who was dragging a rolling suitcase with one hand and checking her phone with the other.

Instinct, honed by years of surviving Florida’s public school system, took over. The heavy, authentic gravel of Clara’s true voice vanished. Her spine straightened, her shoulders squared, and a bright, agreeable, utterly bulletproof smile plastered itself across her face. The ‘teacher mask’ snapped into place so fast it almost gave her whiplash.

“Lily! Hello!” Clara’s voice pitched up a full octave, hitting that familiar, singsong register. “How are you? How was your trip?” She tucked her hands in front of her as she usually did when she addressed her class. Mentally she was sitting on the stool next to her laptop about to hit NEXT on her slideshow for today’s lesson. 

“It was so good!” Lily beamed, stepping forward with that present, unfiltered teenage earnestness that made her such a joy to have in class. “We just got back from seeing my cousins in Ohio. Oh! Miss Votelli, I meant to email you, my mom checked my portal this morning. I got a 4 on the AP Bio exam!!”

“A 4? Lily, that is fantastic!” Clara gushed, placing a hand over her heart in exaggerated, genuine pride. And she was proud. Teaching was Clara’s life’s calling; she loved these kids fiercely, and seeing them succeed was one of her greatest joys. “One more step ahead! Time to start applying to colleges, right?”

“Thanks!” Lily grinned, her mother nodding approvingly behind her.

“Now you can just focus on your cheerleading competition next month, right? No more stressing over standardized tests for the rest of the summer,” Clara added, seamlessly pulling the detail from the mental filing cabinet she meticulously kept for all her students.

“Yes, exactly! We have regionals in three weeks. Anyway, it was so crazy seeing you here. Have a good rest of your summer, Miss Votelli!”

“You too, Lily. Drive safe!”

They waved, and Lily and her mother merged back into the flow of foot traffic toward the exit doors. Clara stood perfectly still, maintaining the bright, vacant smile until Lily’s blonde ponytail disappeared behind a concrete pillar.

Then, the mask slipped.

Clara let out a shuddering breath, her shoulders instantly slumping. A wave of exhaustion washed over her, sudden and heavy. She pressed her fingers against her forehead, feeling the onset of a spinning vertigo. The interaction had been entirely pleasant, perfectly cordial, and yet it left her feeling incredibly hollow.

It was the jarring emotional toll of the pivot. In her head, she had just been exploring the vast, cosmic tapestry of her soul. Out here, she was just Miss Votelli, the safe, sanitized, agreeable educator. She loved her job, she truly did, the joy she found in her classroom and in the moments between as “Miss V” were much of the fabric of her life. And she loved her life, but moments like this reinforced the thick, invisible walls of her isolation.

 She spent her days cultivating a safe, happy space for her students, helping them grow and find their voices, but she herself was a ghost within it. She could never be raw, never be fully, authentically Clara in the physical world without risking everything she had built. Her hand twitched toward her impractical purse, desperate for the comforting weight of her phone, for the Discord app, for Maya’s voice, for the one place she didn’t have to perform. Next her nervous digits immediately shot into her cute-yet-impractical purse, the one without her phone charger, fumbling for her comfort rectangle with shaky hands. Turning on the dim screen to look at Maya’s excited face once more in pixels before the real thing. Swiping open, she immediately went to their DMs and began to type.

[06/11/2026 09:31 am] Clara-bear-a: Hey let me k-

Zero Percent

Her phone died in her hand, turning into a useless black rectangle. The digital tether was severed. She was completely, terrifyingly grounded in the physical world, spinning in the quiet aftershock of her own disguise.

Breathe, Votelli, she whispered to herself. She forced her eyes away from the exit doors and back to the arrivals carousel, desperately needing to anchor herself. She looked at an older couple holding a crumpled welcome sign. She looked at a young man anxiously tapping his foot while checking his watch.

This isn’t just a room full of strangers, Clara realized, her panicked pulse beginning to slow. It’s a monument to reaching out. Every single person in this cavernous terminal was the physical manifestation of a bridge. They were all undeniable proof that people would endure the nightmare of air traffic, the sterile TSA lines, and the agonizing wait, all just to close the gap between one another. The collective unconscious wasn’t just trapped in fiber-optic cables and glowing screens; it was breathing, moving, and loving right here in the humid Florida air. 

In every other liminal space of connection that we find and create. Then, the ambient noise of the terminal seemed to completely fall away. A heavy, rhythmic thud echoed over the hum of the escalator gears.

Clara looked up, and her heart slammed into her ribs.

Maya.

She was descending, standing completely still as the metal stairs carried her downward, but her presence was a sheer force of nature. It was all there, exactly as promised: the heavy, scuffed combat boots hitting the metal grate, the faded denim jacket fiercely armored in glittering protest pins that caught the fluorescent light. Thick, dark hair spilled in wild, chaotic waves around her face, framing flawless, deep brown skin and a jawline Clara had traced through her screen a hundred times. One calloused, ink-smudged hand casually gripped the moving handrail; the other held the strap of her battered leather tote.

Maya’s intense, dark eyes scanned the crowd at the bottom of the escalator. Clara froze, her breath caught in her throat. Without the safety of a screen, she felt impossibly small and vulnerable, entirely stripped of her careful angles and digital filters.

And then, Maya’s gaze locked onto her. The artist’s eyes widened, and a grin, radiant, triumphant, and entirely unfiltered, broke across her beautiful face.

Clara fought back a sudden, overwhelming wave of emotion, desperately trying not to ruin the eye makeup she had spent all morning perfecting. A hot tear slipped down her cheek anyway. She raised a trembling hand, offering a small, teary wave.

Maya stepped off the final metal grate and closed the distance between them in three long, purposeful strides. She didn’t hesitate. She dropped her tote bag to the floor with a heavy thud, reaching out with both calloused hands to gently cup Clara’s face.

“Hiya, Clara” Maya breathed, her voice a warm, raspy anchor that sent a shiver straight down Clara’s spine. “Dios mío. Qué hermosa eres. You look even better in person, mi amor.”

Clara perked up as she heard the beautiful Spanish words in Maya’s ever-present accent, the one she had come to hang on each rolling r and elongated vowel.  She had to return the connection in kind, albeit at a far slower pace than her hispanic girlfriend.“Te he estado esperando por siempre.” The words felt sluggish and clumsy on her tongue, with the rolling r of ‘siempre’ that still gave her trouble, especially through her tearful face. But she was proud; beaming at her effort. 

One that was recognized clearly on the look in Maya’s face. “Para siempre no es tan largo” Maya shot back immediately with a massive grin upon her face, dark eyes looking deeply into Clara’s with a mixture of amused shock and roaring adoration. “My muse, I didn’t think you spoke any…how long have you been practicing?”

A thick, joyous sob escaped Clara’s throat. She let out a wet, shaky laugh, furiously blinking her eyes and fanning her face with one hand. “Babeeeeeee,” Clara choked out, her voice dropping instantly into its natural, gravelly fry, no performative teacher mask in sight. “Months! Months and months!” more tears were beginning to join the mascara-laden waterfall. “I tried really hard to sound right and look super cute for you!” She took a snotty breath, her arms shooting up to her chest almost defensively. “I told myself I wouldn’t cry in front of you the first time you saw me!”

Maya laughed, a rich, booming sound that echoed in Clara’s chest, and pulled her into a fierce, enveloping hug. “Too late, let it out.” She smelled of airplane cabins, sandalwood, and copal incense. Clara buried her face in the collar of the denim jacket, wrapping her arms tightly around the sturdy, physical reality of the woman who had drawn her soul. Tears poured hot and messy, but she didn’t care about anything beyond this moment. 

Deep inside Clara’s purse, her dead phone lay cold and dark. But as Maya’s arms tightened around her, anchoring her completely and beautifully to the physical world, Clara realized she didn’t need it anymore. The bridge was crossed.  The muse had finally found her artist. 

Within her lover’s arms, she felt one last revelation. While her physical home was built upon seven bridges to span the wide, dividing currents of the St. Johns River: Acosta, Buckman, Dames Point, Fuller Warren, Hart, Main Street, the Matthews. All paths in and out, to and from home. In and out of the state and this little patchwork buzzing hive is creeping outward into the outlying counties. And she was thankful for all those patches in the quilt of Jacksonville where she could be safe, where she could connect.

But standing there, taking in all that was Maya, her Maya. Clara realized her own heart was a city of infinite bridges. She had built so many connections over her life, stringing up fragile ropes across the void to reach out to people. Some of those bridges were flimsy, swaying in the wind before eventually rotting away. Some were sturdy but painfully short, never meant to cross a great distance.

But not this one.

The bridge she had built with Maya, forged from a single, shared thought of a curly-haired fox girl, bolstered and constructed of hopeful iron and passionate steel. It was a connection that seemed to go on forever, defying state lines, time zones, and the inherent isolation of the modern world. And that connection, that infinite bridge, stretched out before them into the horizon.