The flat surface run of his invisible keyboard felt electrified as he typed his gmail confession to her. How he'd fallen in love with her long before the first game of cribbage. How he'd successfully broken into the website to give her a birthday greeting for Bill's one hundreth birthday, which was coming up in just two months. For some reason he also confessed his emptiness towards his mother, his confusion over her leaving the family, and his fears that having kids of his own may one day lead his own life down that same path. He wrote of how logic pushed him to figure out what could be hacked, how it could be opened up to him, how being inside a website's core area helped him to feel more in control of himself. What made a website function helped him feel more able to review his own methods of functioning.
His fingers moved at a dancer's pace and rythym, his mind was so connected to his fingers that there didn't seem to be any body parts between them. He enjoyed this aspect of cyberspace, when he connected at that level. When he felt as easy to figure out as a machine. When even his sense of touch and feel was understandable and even beautiful in the way it connected mind to fingers and heart to mind. He could feel inside the box, he could love inside the box, and he could feel and love outside the box, and sometimes the two combined for a most powerful emotion that combined every aspect of his being and the being of the box itself.
His computer suddenly, for no reason, shut off. Looking outside, he noticed the entire block in his area had shut down. No lights at all.
He followed the cord from the minigen and saw that it was not taken off the adapter from last month's recharge. He'd bought the pint sized computer generator for the occsional power outages and surges that were part of the revamping of a system to wireless, but he'd forgotten to put it back on the computer's plug. It sat, fully charged, but disconnected and unable to save anything.
And his confession to her, pages and pages long, may or may not be retrievable. The lights outside came on all at once, and then his system began to reload, but staring at the monitor's emptiness as he listened to the crackles and static of life going back into it, he knew that evey word of what he typed most likely was gone.
But having thought it, having put it into tangible form, having letters and words designate it as more than just a thought or feeling but as something real that could have effect, he knew there wasn't much of a choice when he found that it was erased. He began to type it all out again.
Posted by nft at October 8, 2004 06:34 AM