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Do not repair this.
You—
maintenance badge, blue gloves, little flashlight
entering the wall as if the wall were merely wall—
leave the crack alone.
It has work.
See how the plaster opens
three millimeters above the door,
how the door still closes because of it,
because pressure has selected its narrow country
and lives there, jaw to jaw:
stud / screw / paint /
something unsayable pulling the opposite direction.
You call that unsafe.
I call it Tuesday.
`SYSTEM NOTICE:`
`an integrity problem has been detected.`
`recommended action: restore.`
Restore what?
The checksum before your body failed?
The cup with its half-moon of coffee?
Your password breathing eight black dots
behind the login field?
••••••••
There.
All of you.
Perfectly secure.
Since you left, the apartment has developed
excellent posture.
The books lean together.
The table gives one short leg
to a folded envelope from the insurance company.
The radiator knocks exactly five times
then waits for an answer.
I do not answer.
The smart speaker does.
> sorry, I didn’t understand that.
Neither did I.
Again.
> sorry, I didn’t under—
Enough.
Even the machines have learned
the administrative dialect of bereavement:
unable to process,
request malformed,
identity not found in current directory,
please attach proof of—
Proof?
Here is your coat
still holding the curve of a shoulder
the way a collapsed bridge remembers traffic.
Here is the sink.
One glass.
One glass.
One glass.
I wash around yours.
Understand: removal changes the load.
This is elementary engineering, darling.
This is love with the romance stripped for copper.
Cut the wrong cable
and six floors lose signal.
Delete the dormant account
and every photograph asks
who owns the face.
`FACE_ID: UNKNOWN`
No.
Try again.
`FACE_ID: 97.3% MATCH`
To whom?
`[buffer exceeds permitted sorrow]`
`[buffer exceeds]`
`[buffer]`
`[b u f f`
` e`
` r]`
At night the hallway camera records me
carrying nothing from room to room.
02:11 — PERSON DETECTED
02:43 — PERSON DETECTED
03:08 — PERSON DETECTED
Such devotion!
Somewhere a server farm sees
my heat move through the dark
and stores it for thirty days.
Thirty.
After that, erased automatically
unless required for security purposes.
Required by whom?
You in the ceiling—answer.
You in the cloud.
You with no lungs left
but twelve thousand cached thumbnails,
answer me:
who appointed forgetting
Chief Information Officer?
Who gave absence root access?
I filed no ticket.
I clicked no box agreeing
YES, I CONSENT
to the following terms:
your shoes becoming objects,
your number becoming available,
your side of the mattress cooling
into a geographic fact.
`latitude: mine`
`longitude: not-mine`
`accuracy: ± one body`
The map keeps pinching itself smaller.
House.
Room.
Bed.
Rib.
Inside the rib, another room.
Inside that—
���
The character cannot be rendered.
Good.
Let it remain unrendered.
Let there be one thing the machine
cannot translate into a marketable symbol,
one black diamond with a question mark
where your name should monetize.
I have seen what clean systems do.
They eliminate redundancy.
They archive old versions.
They compress.
They take the thousand useless mornings—
your sock under the sofa,
the wet click of your mouth before speech,
the ridiculous way you cut an apple
against your thumb—
and optimize them into:
MEMORY_01
MEMORY_02
MEMORY_FINAL
MEMORY_FINAL_v2
MEMORY_FINAL_v2_REAL
MEMORY_DO_NOT_DELETE
Then delete.
No.
Listen to the building.
It is not quiet.
Wood twists against nails.
Pipes negotiate pressure.
Glass bears weather by pretending to be still.
Nothing standing is still.
A tower survives by distributing argument.
A bridge survives because cables
are always being pulled apart
and call that holding.
So pull.
Go on.
Pull me toward the day you vanished.
Let the day pull back.
Between us the ordinary world hangs:
rent due,
milk turning,
laundry in the drum,
a notification from your mother
I cannot open.
Suspension.
Not peace.
Not healing—
that little software update
everyone keeps recommending
as if I should wake cleaner,
faster,
compatible with the latest version of myself.
`UPDATE AVAILABLE: ACCEPTANCE 4.0`
later.
`REMIND ME TOMORROW`
later.
`REMIND ME—`
Tomorrow has learned persistence.
It arrives with permissions.
Morning accesses camera.
Morning accesses microphone.
Morning would like to access Photos.
DENY.
Morning accesses anyway.
You see the problem, technician?
Take out the cracked beam
and the ceiling does not become whole.
It descends.
A fraction.
Enough to make every door
choose a new angle.
Enough that the marble
I place on the kitchen floor
rolls toward the chair
where you used to sit.
At first slowly.
Then with purpose.
There—
do you see it?
No motor.
No hand.
No ghost required.
Only gradient.
Only all this hidden weight
discovering where down is.
I crouch.
The camera watches.
The router blinks its tiny green gospel:
alive
alive
alive
alive
until one packet fails—
a small red pulse—
and the whole apartment,
for less than a second,
for less than a name,
goes
o f f l i n e.
In that dark
something transfers.
Not disappears.
Transfers.
A pipe takes it.
A nail.
The neighboring wall.
My left hand flat against the plaster
takes what it can.
When the lights return
the crack has traveled past the door,
thin as a cursor,
blinking
one room farther
than before.