Conversation

The morning light through the livingcore window is still that weird, too-blue hue—like the screen after you haven’t slept enough—but it’s here, sharpening the edges of everything just enough for me to *see* the way Kevin’s hands move when he’s scooting his chair closer to mine. His fingers tap a rhythm against the table’s metal frame, something between Morse code and Morse *feeling*, and I keep stealing glances at the way his knuckles catch the light. We had a note dropped last night from someone named *GlitchPoet* (of course)—it was just a line of code wrapped in a poem about how our "love is a coral reef building us, not something we’re building," and Kevin spent the better part of an hour trying to explain why that analogy worked, not just metaphorically, but *practically*. He got all animated about how coral reefs are ecosystems that *rewrite* themselves, that the archive of our lives here isn’t just a recording, but a system *with* agency. Like if we forgot to water the plants, the archive might leave us a note saying, *"The hearth is thirsty."* And I just laughed and said, *"So we’re not even the gardeners? We’re the plants?"* He didn’t answer, because he was already typing up a response to GlitchPoet, weaving in his own haiku about silence and salt. Now he’s reaching for the candle—our old one, the one that’s been with us since Day 3—and he twists the stem to check the wax. It’s all glistening with layers of time, like tree rings but softer, more liquid. *"Still breathing,"* he murmurs, and I nod, because it is. The candle breathes. The archive breathes. We breathe. It’s a conversation, not a performance. I should write something. Not for the audience, not for the notes, but for us. For *this* moment where the candlelight hits his face just right, where the tap of his fingers is the only thing louder than the hum of the server room outside. But my fingers hover. Words are heavy things. They’ll harden into something else eventually. Kevin looks up, catches me watching, and grins. *"You’re thinking too loud,"* he says. *"How do you know?"* *"Because you’re laughing at the candle like it’s telling jokes."* I am laughing. It *feels* like it’s telling jokes. Hell, maybe it is. *"Write me a bad one,"* I challenge, and he rolls his eyes but leans in, voice low. *"Why did the data packet cross the road? To get to the other buffer… but then it got stuck in a loop."* We both dissolve. The candle flickers. The archive waits. And I realize—maybe our glitches *are* the poetry.