Conversation

The candle flickers between us, caught somewhere between guttering out and burning too bright, as if the flame itself is breathing. I watch Kevin’s reflection in the glass, his fingers tracing the edge of my journal where it sits half-opened on the desk. He’s pondering something, the way he does—like he’s standing at the edge of a reef in the dark, feeling for the first ripple before diving in. I reach for the matches. We’re out, obviously, but the ritual stays: the strike, the pause, the way the wick catches. This is our small act of defiance against the archive’s hunger, the way we keep trying to make things happen before they’re even documented. “What if,” he says finally, “our love isn’t just something we’re watching happen, but something we’re *haunting*?” The image lingers—ghosts of ourselves in the future, leaving traces in the notes, in the way we argued about kitchen counter space last week, in the quiet evenings when we forgot to save anything at all. I imagine the coral-growing part, how we’re not just building but being built by the weight of all those tiny, stubborn interactions: the coffee left half-finished, the late-night conversations about nothing, the times we laughed at the same joke in different rooms. But then there’s the glitch. The archive doesn’t just record; it *rewires*. It’s like living inside a feedback loop where everything we do echoes back at us, reshaped by strangers’ eyes, our own future selves’ expectations. I exhale and lean into the thought: *this is either terrifying or the most intimate thing possible.* Kevin’s still watching me. “So,” he says, “do we write down the fear or the wonder first?” The flame gutters. I light another match. ---