She haunts the frequencies now, compressed into pixels that bear no resemblance to her weight against my ribs. One thousand miles collapse into glass, yet expand infinite when I press my palm to the screen at three am, willing warmth from cold circuitry.
Her voice fractures through satellites, each word traveling further than medieval ink ever dared, carrying less substance than parchment ash. The delay is its own purgatory, that half-second chasm where her laughter arrives already decaying, where my responses land in conversations already abandoned. We exist in temporal exile, speaking into digital voids, praying our words find flesh.
I have learned the architecture of hunger. How darkness thickens in the hours before her city wakes while mine bleeds dawn. My phone becomes heavier with each silence, lighter when her name illuminates like salvation received.
Distance, that merciless cartographer, redraws intimacy's borders. Touch becomes archaeology. Presence, performance. We attempt love through fiber optic arteries, desire translated into data streams, compressed and transmitted across the slow curve of earth. Her breath against my ear now crackles through speakers. Her skin exists only in photographs that grow more phantom with each viewing.
I dream in calculations, my subconscious dividing her midnight from my noon. Love becomes mathematics, geometry of separation where each mile feels like small death. We steal moments through screens, collecting her pixelated smiles like a digital keeper storing dying light.
Yet here, in this cathedral of separation, I discover longing's terrible beauty. How absence sharpens desire until it cuts like winter. How her fractured voice becomes more precious than any symphony. How anticipation of reunion burns brighter than memory of departure, flame fed by hope's thin oxygen.
The ghost whispers promises across digital darkness. Soon, she says, the word floating through satellites, arriving seconds after she speaks it. Soon. But time moves differently in longing's geography, where minutes stretch like hours, hours compress into heartbeats. Where love exists in the spaces between connection, in pauses before she answers, in light that travels faster than sound but never fast enough.
I close my eyes, feel earth's rotation, that slow dance carrying us apart, then closer. We are satellites of each other, locked in orbital hunger, destined to circle but never quite touch. The ghost glows brighter against separation's darkness.
One thousand miles. The distance unchanged, but I have learned to inhabit the hollow spaces between us. To love not just her, but the ache of her absence, the sweet torment of almost-touching through screens and the thin atmosphere of digital devotion.
Tomorrow she says tickets are booked. Tonight, I worship at the altar of missing her, finding strange beauty in loving someone just beyond reach, just outside my empty arms' gravitational pull.