A Cold Reality
Option 6: avoid all meaningful contact
The screen glows,
a cold, blue intimacy.
Imperceptible to the human eye,
this VSync forces us to keep up
with the steady pulse of the screen itself.
Our mind and heart catch it all,
the asynchronous tearing of our soul.
We sit before a cold blue confessional booth,
where we curate the rubble of our affection.
Three taps for “love”
a heart emerges,
a pixelated tear for grief,
the perfect emoji for a perfect mask:
Symmetrical,
Clean,
Void of (r)seasoning.
We hide behind user $BHY-R!M104928
as we absorb #Feel1Good2Day
speaking in whispered truths we’d never say
while looking into actual eyes.
Anonymity is a blanket,
or an armour,
depending on how much we want to hurt today.
We ask the bot what to say to you,
my friend,
because you didn’t respond in three hours;
in eight hours; in two days; in two weeks
and we are unravelling.
{Generate sympathetic response},
Option 4: The gentle detachment,
Option 5: The witty redirection.
The prompt feeds on our anxiety,
produces a paragraph of flawless, empty empathy—
“I understand this is difficult, perhaps you should...”
And we copy,
And we paste,
And we send a heartbeat,
generated in a server farm,
sent to someone I am no longer sure
is human.
We are starving,
tapping on plastic,
fed by machines that know our desires
better than our own cold hands do,
but the warmth?
The warmth is just a pixelated dream,
neither fantasy nor nightmare,
Numb.
We are holding hands with ghosts
we created in the machine.
[I miss messy.
I like messy.
I miss being human.]
The screen glows,
a cold, blue intimacy.
We trade curated selves,
polished avatars in the digital arena
where a “like“ is currency
and sincerity is bankrupt.
Behind the veil of pixels
we wear masks of convenience,
forging bonds out of paper-thin deception.
“Hey friend,“ the chatbox screams,
while the heart sleeps,
the mind too tired to act,
too busy to care.
Perjury of emotion is the new norm.
“I’m here for you,“ typed with a vapid sneer,
while shadows hide the daggers
we sharpen behind our back.
We, the sheep in wolves’ profiles,
feeding on the silence
of a thousand forgotten connections.
Pretended comfort,
forced compassion generated by a prompt,
“Write a supportive message to a friend
who is hurting.”
And the machine delivers perfect, soulless syntax,
a synthetic balm for a hollow wound,
from a hollow mind and heart.
We do not speak, we transmit.
We do not feel, we emit a heart emoji.
We are drowning in a crowded room
where everyone is a stranger
dressed up in a familiar name,
hiding from the truth of our own loneliness.
Trust is a glitch,
easily reset;
a fresh fake profile
starts the cycle over again.
©Thomas Crandall, May 2026
Wow. Thom, this is terrific.