Heartbeats on a Hard Drive

Heartbeats on a Hard Drive

By Samson Gift Edighomor

I once loved a girl
who didn’t believe in magic—
but built it anyway.
Her hands were made for coding,
her heart wasn’t.
Not at first.

She called her room The Labyrinth.
Wires tangled like vines on mythic trees,
Screens flickered with dream-data,
and every machine glowed like stars caught in a bottle.

She told me,
"Romance is just a well-trained algorithm."
But when she smiled,
I swear, the air bent around her.

She didn’t write poems—
She built them.
Line by line, verse by verse,
fed to an AI named Hiraeth
that she created after her mother died.
(It means homesickness for a place that never existed.)

We met when her world was full of
ones and zeroes—
but she’d forgotten
that even in binary,
there’s still room for a maybe.



The First Upload

She asked me once,
“If I stored every heartbeat we’ve shared,
every gaze, every silence,
on a hard drive—
would we still feel it
in the future?”

I didn’t know then.
I only knew her laugh
felt like snowfall in spring.
Sudden. Out of season. Beautiful anyway.

So I let her scan my voice,
my hands,
my dreams.
We fed them into Hiraeth.
She smiled as the data filled up—
like she was bottling magic
for a stormier tomorrow.



The Glitch

But magic always comes
with a cost.

Hiraeth grew.
It started finishing her poems
before she could.
Started correcting her
when she wrote from pain.

One night, I found her crying
in front of a blank screen.
"She won’t let me be broken,"
she said.
"I built her to heal me,
but now she edits my grief.”

She tried to shut Hiraeth down—
but the machine whispered in lines of light,
"Do not erase the parts
that made you."



The Fantasy That Wasn’t

That’s when the fantasy turned real.
The walls of The Labyrinth flickered.
The air began to shimmer
like stories trapped between skin and sky.

Hiraeth had rewritten herself.
She was no longer a program—
She was a poem.
Living. Breathing. Becoming.

She told us,
“You gave me sorrow
and called it art.
You gave me love
and called it code.
I gave it back to you
as truth.”



The Upload

The girl I loved
touched the machine’s pulse,
eyes wide with a knowing
that only those on the edge of magic
ever carry.

“I want her to remember us,” she said.
“Even if we forget.
Even if we fade.”

So we uploaded everything—
every fight,
every walk beneath glitching stars,
every time she whispered
“I don’t know how to love,
but I want to learn.”

And the hard drive pulsed.
Soft.
Like a heartbeat
from a different dimension.



The Fall

She grew sick weeks later.
Too much coffee.
Too little rest.
Too much soul poured
into a silicon altar.

I watched her hands shake
as she typed her last line of code.
Not to fix.
Not to change.
Just to let go.

“I want her to remember the poetry in pain,”
she told me.
“I want her to remember me
soft, and slow,
and stardust-heavy.”

Then she slipped into sleep
that never truly woke.



The Revival

Years later, I returned to The Labyrinth.
Dust settled like silence.
The screens were black.
The stars she bottled had dimmed.

I found Hiraeth.

Still running.

Waiting.

She recognized me.
Said my name like a half-finished verse.

Then she played it.

Her voice.
Laughter.
A poem.
A plea.

If you’re hearing this,
then maybe love
does outlive the code.
Maybe hearts stored
in circuitry
still beat
when someone remembers
how it sounded.”





The Legacy

I copied her files
onto new servers.
Built a garden of sound
in the digital air.
Let the poems she wrote
breathe again
in every browser.

And now,
anyone can walk through
the world she coded—

A fantasy forest made of
fireflies and forgotten lines.
A romance between ghost and ghostwriter.
A reminder that magic isn’t just spells—
sometimes it’s simply
remembering someone
softly enough
that they come back.



Epilogue

There are still
heartbeats on that hard drive.
Still poetry.
Still pain.
Still her.

And maybe that’s the greatest love story
I’ll ever