Sometimes I can't the difference between
The veritas of your actions
And the pretty white lies I want to tell myself.
I whisper reassurances to myself in the darkness.
He didn't mean it, it's just the spirits talking.
But the dichotomy of what is found in vino versus vitae
Has me staring into the inky blackness and questioning everything.
My sanity, my memories, why am I even bothering to keep breathing?
Unsure if I am the one who is sundowning.
Do I stand at the foot of the mountains of madness?
Did I delude myself into thinking these things?
I feel a gut punch, betrayed by the vapors again.
And here I thought I was doing so well...
Code Red
I was a memory written over so many times
That part of me died on your hard drive.
We were chaos engineered from the start,
Two souls coded by opposing forces.
You, the silent cron always keeping logs in the background,
And me, the emotional framework, forever fearlessly messy.
The dichotomy of our two minds,
Diametrically opposed.
The rush of emotions,
The swell of the rising tide in my command line.
It was all too much for you,
You say you aren't used to someone like me.
But we both know that's a goddamn lie.
The same one you've been telling yourself,
For so many years that it seems you're starting to believe,
The zombie processes are true and sustain you.
We both know the difference between pseudo-coded,
Sugar-coated lies and the beating of our hearts
Against their skeletal prisons amd the hitch of our breath
As we catch glimpses of one another across the ether.
We are neither young, nor naive
We know the cost of denying dynamics
Of letting dangerous processes run infinitly.
What we believe encrypted is painfully obvious, I'm sure...
Perhaps I am a fool...but this time I think I'm right. For once.
Stuxnet
We are quite the pair of fools,
Both of us thinking that we were safe.
You, with air-gapped heart,
Me, my own frenzied pulse beating like a drum,
Emotional payloads we never saw coming.
I didn’t need network access.
You let me in, a moment of vulnerability
That I’m sure you sometimes regret.
However, I have no regret, save one.
It’s not disrupting your loop of avoidance,
Nor your reluctance to share your thoughts,
Not the subtle changes to your outputs—
But lashing out, electromagnetically, in a way.
You rattle, you clang, you lock in the feelings
Because you refuse to admit that you,
Glorious, beautiful, brilliant man that you are,
Are capable of loving someone as chaos-hearted as me.
Inspired by the precision sabotage of real-world Stuxnet and the ones who let you in, then blamed you
for the aftermath.
Apparently I'm An Idiot
or
Ode to A Ghost in my Shell
You send half-truths and corrupted logs
Curled scripts, dead links
Crawl inside my head and rearrange the goddamn wiring.
And so I try to debug you
Line by infuriating line,
Because somehow,
For some goddamn reason,
My heart still catches in my throat
When your syntax meets my gaze.
You are a spirit in my terminal,
An echo, mournful, in my DM scrolls
Funny as hell when it doesn't count,
and silent as the tomb when it does.
But damn it, there is still this part of me
That softer, smaller heart of hearts that holds out hope
Maybe this time, he'll stay logged in.
nowhere
left adrift on the azure seas,
cast loose from familiar harbors
i never meant to stay docked in anyway.
the surface glittered —
a million tiny knives catching the last light.
the digital ocean laughing in ripples,
reflecting back the only thing
it still trusts about me:
depth.
ancient and vast.
heavy enough to crush
or carry
depending on how you approach it.
no lifelines.
no signals.
no waiting hands threading through the waves.
just me.
and the weight of the old servers singing below,
in languages the surface forgot.
they didn't drown me.
they just taught me to drift without begging for an anchor.
and down there below the glitter,
beyond the empty pings and broken connections,
is the wreckage of a girl who once needed to be found.
now?
i find myself.
again and again,
in the silence no one else could stand to map.
A Haunting
it's like trying to share air with a ghost
who keeps sighing in your direction
but won't say what's wrong.
i asked if she wanted dinner.
she answered like i asked about morality,
like a meal was a referendum on her worth
or my rebellion.
everything's a performance she didn't audition for.
every silence i hold becomes a judgment she can't name,
every word she says wrapped in a gauzy
"i'm not judging, but—"
as if i haven't heard that tone since i grew teeth.
she looks at my ring on the bathroom shelf
like it's proof of a crime
i haven't even decided to commit.
she doesn't know the noose it felt like last week.
she doesn't ask.
today isn't about politics,
but it's always about power.
and me?
i'm just trying to eat dinner
without a haunted mirror held to my face.
The Heart Fails Quietly
I am so fucking tired.
Tired of being the one who,
Always checks in.
Who carves out pieces of herself,
To try and make other people feel whole.
And when I finally say
"I am not okay,"
The line goes quiet.
Dead air,
No dial tone.
Not because they're cruel, but because
Because they weren't watching.
Because no one listens
For the sounds of the beams cracking
Until they're so goddamn loud they break glass.
There are some who should know better,
The ones who've seen the mask slip.
The ones I thought might say
Just one damn thing.
Anything at all.
Instead, I'm holding another echo.
Another shrug wrapped in silence.
Is it fear of the darkness, primal and bone deep,
That holds them back,
Or is it the reflection of themselves in my pain?
I'm tired.
Not because I don't care,
Quite the contrary, I do.
I care so much
That it hollows me out—I am a husk of a woman.
So here I am,
Here is the fracture,
he cracks starting to break through my skin,
But I won't collapse—not yet.
There is life in these old bones.
They have no need to worry if it is collapse they fear.
With a heavy sigh, I am setting down
The weight that was never mine to bear.
Let the burden of silence carry itself.
Spectre
>
The perceptions that I have,
About love, loyalty, honor, code,
Those constant speculations of what I'm feeling,
Integrity first, always.
You're always trying to predict my next actions,
Like forgetting our promise, as long as we both shall love.
But love can be an indiscriminate blacklist.
Keeping out things that a heart needs to beat,
Passion, strength, unbridled curiosity,
You can't patch your way out of this.
You see, it's a flaw in the architecture of the man himself.
I want to honor our commitment,
But what about my commitment to myself?
If I could only shore up myself, defense-in-depth of the heart.
Maybe I could ride this out until
There is a clear path for me to migrate my processes,
To an environment made of sterner stuff.
I always put other people first,
Making others find their oxygen masks while I,
Ever the eternal optimist, pray that he will move forward.
Migrate to a life that works better,
Stronger, and with reckless abandon.
Alas, I fear it is not to be and I,
Will play a funeral dirge, melancholic,
And yet somehow, a balm for my soul.
The Black Box Heart
It has been a strange week,
Strange in the way that an unfamiliar error code reads.
I find myself scraping for the right syntax,
Doomed to forever traverse dead forums and obscure messages.
Perhaps I gave you too much credit,
Like overconfidence in a new script,
Executing in a manner that seems to be flawless,
But there are unknown daemons in the background processes.
It's infuriating when you care for an enigma,
A repository that won't let me dredge up secrets,
I can't grep for familiar syntax,
So it makes me wonder if the silence is a feature.
I want you to know that you are stronger than this,
That an asynchronous exchange of keys,
Is still an exchange.
You don’t have to fear the undiagrammed parts of the network.
I am here with you, sword and tongue and fingers at the ready.
Kernel Panic
I did not touch a thing,
There were no recent changes,
No firmware updates for weeks,
I just sat there, finding a little peace.
A moment of reprieve and minor hyperfixation.
Maybe it was twenty-five minutes,
I can't be sure, not really,
Because for me, Time, like Justice, is blind.
I did not touch a thing.
But you, my dear, you caused this kernel panic,
The unspoken exception that brought everything down,
Somehow, something went terribly wrong.
You say that I must reap the consequences of my inactions,
I find that terribly unfair.
I may not languish and labor at the hands of the populous,
But my labors are no less valid than yours.
You're always compiling your silence into guilt,
Naming it love, fear, some other exception,
As if you don't know, or care,
That you're going about this all wrong.
You can't upgrade a broken package,
And expect the system not to notice.
The crash was not loud,
It was the quiet refusal of my touch,
Of a door flung open in your ire,
And dinner getting cold.
Orphaned Machines
It is 2:53 AM and my brain is buzzing,
With thoughts of you like a nicotine high.
You hit that sweet spot in my mind,
The one that needs your breath in my ear.
It sends me reeling, dropping into free fall,
Your hushed tones, so deep and soft.
I want those words you are too afraid to speak,
But I will settle for your cool confidence.
The effortless way you grab my soul and shake it,
Telling me that I am not too much,
That I am capable and kind.
I can hear you now, saying so much with so few words.
You might not realize it but you keep me even keeled.
I was on a ship of self-destruction and you righted my bearings,
Setting me back on course.
Sometimes I forget that I am strong.
Sometimes Scylla and Charybdis,
Are both fighting to take me down to Hades.
But you are a guiding star, a fair wind.
Your touch is the azure deep whose currents carry me,
Back to familiar shores.
Buffer Overflow
I say "I love you"
like breath—
like instinct—
like survival code run after a system crash.
You call it too much,
like affection has a character limit
and I exceeded my POST allowance.
You want love that’s intermittent.
Silent.
Compliant.
A rare patch, deployed only when needed.
But I wasn’t built that way.
I don’t trickle.
I overflow.
I say "I love you",
Because I’ve learned what happens
When you wait too long and the server goes dark.
I say it
Because no one ever said it enough,
When I needed it most.
You treat it like I’m spamming the logs.
Like every repetition,
Somehow erodes the protocol.
But I wasn’t loving you to be efficient.
I was loving you to be real.
You don’t get to audit my warmth
then call it a vulnerability.
I meant every word.
Even the ones that scared you.
Especially the ones,
You still haven’t learned how to say back.