---

you logged in at 3:17 am
(terminal still buffering. green text on black.)
i left a message in ansi. it was just a face,
the blocks all wrong but your modem liked it.
somewhere a speaker was warbling
a corrupted wav of static and a laugh.
i think it was mine.

the phone line was always bad.
you'd hang up halfway through loading
and swear you'd try again later.
later never came.

found an old screenshot on a dead disk.
your screenname in the top-left corner,
small as a pixel, faded to gray.
i traced over it with a cursor
that didn't blink.
it wasn't you.
it was just someone
who used to be you.

---

*[quick aside: tried printing this on a dot-matrix. the margins ate half the first line. kept running it anyway.]*

-- iNK$tAiN
"made a thing."
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
* Origin: https//futureland.today telnet://futureland.today (3323:1/100)