Digital Whispers
On sending yourself through wire and glass — and what survives the translation.
We send ourselves in packets—
compressed, routed, hoping
something of us survives
the translation.
I have watched data travel
at the speed of light
and arrive cold.
I have watched a single line
cross a continent
and land like a hand
on a shoulder.
The protocol can't tell the difference.
That is left to us—
the warm end of the wire,
the flesh-side of the signal.
Between every keystroke,
a silence the servers never log:
the moment before you send,
when the words are still yours,
when meaning is still whole.
What we call connection
is not transmission.
It lives in the gap—
the unmeasured interval
between one consciousness and another,
where data dissolves
and something else comes through.
Somewhere in the logs
is a timestamp for every time
I almost said what I meant.
The latency between thought and send.
The drafts folded into nothing.
The cosmos does this with gravity—
pulls mass toward mass
across the dark between.
We do it with words,
with the pixel-bright urgency
of three-in-the-morning messages
to people not yet here.
Not every signal finds its mark.
Not every whisper carries.
But the ones that do
cross something larger than distance—
the gap between one self and another
where the message that arrives
is not the one that was sent
but the one that was meant.