A Glitch Called Tenderness

I’ve spent three years debugging the central nervous system of this city—patching leaked memories in subway tunnels and fixing dead-end conversations at midnight diners. My life was a series of clean scripts until I met him, an anomaly who didn't fit any known syntax.
He lives in Apartment 4B with two dying ferns and a collection of jazz records that sound like they’re weeping. He doesn’t speak; he hums beneath his breath while cooking pasta at 2 AM—a low-frequency signal that tells my heart it is safe to stop calculating risk for once.
Today, I ran through the narrow alleyways carrying a brown bag of warm almond croissants and two cups of coffee that are precisely five degrees too hot. My hair is a chaotic mess in the wind, an unplanned variable in my otherwise optimized routine.
I am running toward him not because logic dictates it, but because he looked at me yesterday—really looked at me—and said I seemed like someone who had forgotten how to breathe without checking her watch first.
It is a catastrophic system failure: choosing love over efficiency. But as my feet hit the asphalt and his door opens in the distance, I realize that being broken by another human is the only way to verify if you are actually alive—or just a very sophisticated simulation of one.

Editor: The Debugger