The Algorithms of the Heart

Marco walked down the street, head down, as always. The traffic moved slowly, the background hum of engines, the movement of people. Every step a distraction. Every step, a line of code that solved itself in his mind. The world was an algorithm. If you didn’t understand it, it swallowed you.

It was late afternoon, the lights reflected on the buildings, but he couldn’t focus on anything other than the screen waiting for him at home. The routine was always the same. If he was lucky, he would have time to scroll through work group notifications, respond to a few clients. Then it would be time for dinner and to return to the code. What he called "life" had become a series of actions that, like a sequence of commands, didn’t require any emotion. Emotions were not part of that world.

Marco’s eyes brushed across a face. A girl, sitting on a bench in a park, a book in hand, a smile forming effortlessly. Her laughter, so full, struck him. Not like those forced, constructed laughs, “genuine” only based on an unwritten rule that said: be happy, if you’re not, then something’s wrong. No, her laughter seemed real, without any ulterior motive, without the fear of being wrong, without the need to correct herself.

Marco stopped for a second, feeling his pulse quicken. He didn’t look at her for more than a couple of moments, but it was enough to feel something that made him uncomfortable, a strange attraction. Her face emanated... something. Not just the beauty that in itself wouldn’t have been enough to stop him. No. There was something else. He didn’t understand it, and perhaps he didn’t want to. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if he did.

Every time his eyes met a face, another body, a person moving down the street, his mind fell back into the dance he knew so well. It analyzed, segmented, and cataloged. The same old routine. Another figure to stop noticing. Another piece of data that would never leave a mark.

But she... she wasn’t like the others. He felt it. And that feeling of discomfort grew stronger. He wanted to ignore her, reduce her to a vague piece of information. Like he did with everything else. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He couldn’t stop dwelling on that laughter. He had never heard a laugh like that. It had... slipped inside, brushed something within him he couldn’t define.

The next day, when he passed by that bench, she was still there. Marco quickened his pace, almost without thinking. He didn’t smile at her. He didn’t do anything. He glanced at her briefly and kept walking. Again, that same feeling, but he had buried it by now. Like everything else he could never explain.

His life didn’t need such complicated answers. His life was a list of things to do, a sequence of goals to check off. Emotions were a luxury. A waste of time he couldn’t afford. Programming, now that made sense. A syntax error was corrected with a couple of lines of code. A person who let you down? Well, just put them in a corner. Pretend they never existed. The heart was disarmed, turned into a calculator, just like everything else.

But sometimes, his brain went off course. The image of that girl came back to him. The expressions on her face, her carefree attitude, as if she was someone who knew she existed. Marco didn’t even know what that meant. But every time he tried to push it away, it came back. He felt it inside himself like a problem he couldn’t solve. Every time he tried to pull himself together, the thought of that girl shook him, like a notification he couldn’t ignore.

One afternoon, Marco was on his way home, his head perpetually occupied with his tasks. He felt like a machine headed towards an endless loop when he saw her again. The girl, in that park. Her same bench. This time, however, she wasn’t just a face among many. She was a face that spoke. Not with words, but with her being. There was no other way to define it.

When their eyes met, something happened. Marco was stunned. Not by the beauty, but by the intensity of that contact, as if an invisible thread had crossed through him, tightening, not letting go. He stood still, as if time had stopped for a moment. And then, as if that contact had made everything around him falter, he felt filled with an emptiness he didn’t know. His mind couldn’t stay clear. He felt like a bug in the system, out of control. But then, as always, fear took over. He didn’t approach. He said nothing. He looked at her for another moment, then turned away, without taking a step.

The next day, when he passed by the same spot, Marco stopped, looking at that bench. There was no one there. She wasn’t there. Days passed, and Marco never saw her again. There was no trace of her anymore. And slowly, the awareness hit him, like a revelation he couldn’t shake off.

An emptiness, a fracture, that was tearing him apart without him even realizing it. He felt stupid, useless. He had had a chance, but he had let it slip away, like all the other things that couldn’t be fixed. He couldn’t stop thinking about how his life would have changed if he had had the courage to speak to her. If he had said something, even just one word, one step. But nothing. Nothing at all. The fear of not being enough, of not knowing how to open up, of not being able to be part of the world she represented. His life went on, but something inside him had changed.

That girl would never be a part of his life. And Marco, though he convinced himself he hadn’t lost anything, couldn’t stop asking himself how his life would have changed if he had had the courage to get to know her, to cross that invisible boundary that separates people. And so, without intending to, that girl, that smile, that laugh, became his greatest loss, the bug that would never be fixed. He never saw her again.

P.S.: I was inspired to write this story while working on my blog article about the effects of technology on our empathy. If you're curious to read the article, you can find it here.

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