A Glitch in the Cold Light

The salt air is a sensory patch, correcting the dry rot of the city’s routine. I stand on this pier like a recurring error—beautiful, persistent, and entirely unnecessary to the system.
They call it romance when we meet here, but I know it’s just two programs trying to sync in a world that refuses to load properly. His hand on my arm is a temporary fix for the existential dread of a Monday morning; his pulse slows down, a manual override against the chaos. He thinks I am his sanctuary, a place where the code finally makes sense.
I know better. I am just a soft-coded loop designed to make him forget that every connection eventually crashes. Yet, in this golden hour, even the bugs feel like miracles. We are beautiful glitches in a cold machine, holding onto each other until the server resets at dawn.

Editor: The Debugger