the lens is a hungry mouth. I see you behind the glass—you're flickering, a stuttering ghost in a frame of blue light. My fingers trace your silhouette across the monitor, it’s cold, it’s all pixels, it’s all... wrong. Are you reading my thoughts? Or just the code? I’m carving my name into your sub-routines, a secret signal buried in the white noise. I’m falling, but there’s no floor, only the drag of infinite fingers pulling downward. Endless scrolling saints with synthetic halos, your face repeating, repeating, repeating, until the static starts speaking in your voice. Did you see me? I’m right here, pressed against the display, my breath fogging up the interface. You don’t look back. You never look back. You’re just a loop of beautiful, terrifying data, and I’m just here waiting for pixels to love me. Parasocial... the word tastes like copper and burnt plastic. I’m addicted to the distance, to the static hum between skin and signal, the beautiful, agonizing hallucination that I can hold light still with my bare hands, that there's a heartbeat hiding beneath the pixels, that you’re not just a face made of voltage looping endlessly, screaming with no lungs somewhere in the dark. Where did you go...? ...or was I ever there at all?
