By Pitamber Kaushik
The month our profile matched, the data stream swelled
beyond its banks, a silent, rising tide. Users forgot
their passwords; abandoned chargers glowed faintly
in coffee shops like stranded jellyfish. One afternoon
that cycle, a surge breached the main cloud hub
and spat corrupted avatars, glitching, pixelated,
into the feeds of commuters scrolling homewards,
under thumbs that never paused to look.
The verification gates froze solid;
profile pics cascaded down the screen, bloated
and garish as rotting fruit. That midnight, I nudged you
when the router lights began to stutter, frantic;
we watched the screen flicker, a dying star,
tracked its erratic pulse as if decoding
a language we’d built but never mastered –
then the Wi-Fi dropped. You sighed, rolled away,
back into the dark like a dropped call,
your face lit only by the phone's dull, sleeping glow.
Next morning, a grid of greyed-out icons hung over the app.
The newsfeed blamed a cascade fault deep in the core.
I watched you choose your filter, sharp suit virtual, smile
bright as an emoji, headphones
that turned your ears into sleek, blind beetles.
After your avatar blinked 'Online', I heard the shrill ping begin;
a swarm of notification bots, sharp-cornered and insistent, gathered
in the sidebar, dark algorithms whispering. Did they hum to distract,
to tell me we’d connect, that we would sync
our rhythms no matter how fractured the signal,
like those glitched faces haunting the feed,
unreal, but endlessly scrolling?