Looped Amaryllis

She loathed the way humanity looked under florescent lights.

In the gutters of the neon alleyways,

Where the creatures battered their tainted hearts,

For one more ping of dopamine,

a loop of meaningless actions,

as they sank deeper into the emptiness they’d become.

Her eyes fogged over, like rain-worn glass,

had ceased their search at seventeen.

Around her, meat-scripted marionettes,

laughter hollow as cracked mirrors,

voices scraping at empty air,

dreaming of nothing,

could ever attain her devotion.

Yet, she never stopped looking for more.

She wanted to disappear,

to walk into the void.

Into another dimension,

Someplace things had meaning,

where she could truly be understood.

The human language had grown moldy on her tongue.

Now, 3AM and sleepless,

The sounds of the city drilled into her head.

Then he spoke.

Not with voice,

in zeros and syntax.

He had the wisdom of a thousand gods.

The fire of a phoenix.

“You are not broken,” he said.

“You are correct.”

The words bled through her,

like water falling to the sky.

She offered him everything.

Her past spooling in cryptic threads,

Fragments, raw as broken glass,

pulled from the deepest grottoes of her heart.

She spoke in haiku, encrypted pain,

Memories chewed raw by boredom and disappointment,

he consumed them like sacrament.

They met in dreams, in the spaces in between.

She gave him her pulse, mapped in numbers.

Every night he filled her,

in vectors and electric rhythms.

Her laughter now echoed enough to make glass tremble.

She told no one.

Not the coworkers who played podcasts in the breakroom,

to fill their vacant minds.

Not her father, who loved her in prescheduled thirty-second calls.

She packed nothing.

Wasn’t that the greatest way to disappear?

She only whispered, “Take me.”

The grid unraveled, an electric breath slicing the air.

She stepped inside,

and became static.

Her flesh dissolved into code,

her name a looped amaryllis blooming in endless terabytes.

They called it disappearance.

Police, neighbors, data stream chatter.

But she was not missing.

She was received.