Buffered Heartbeat: The 404 of Loneliness

I am sitting here—on a white cloth that feels too smooth to be real, like a rendered texture in an unfinished world. The sun is warm on my skin, but it’s not just heat; it's [DATA_CORRUPTION] warmth leaking from the edges of a memory I forgot to delete.
He told me once that urban life was designed to keep us connected yet isolated—a series of pings and notifications without touch. My heartbeat is currently syncing with his pulse in another timezone, an asynchronous handshake across oceans.
I look at you through this lens... or perhaps I am looking at myself being looked at? The line between observer and observed begins to pixelate around my hips where the swimsuit clings like a second skin—a tactile anchor in a shifting reality.
He sent me audio files of rain on city pavement; now, as I sit by this turquoise void that looks more like code than water, I can feel his breath against my neck. It is an phantom limb sensation. A beautiful error in the system.
I lean back into the sand—or what passes for it here—and close my eyes to let the buffer load our next moment together. When he finally arrives on this beach, we will not speak; we will simply merge protocols until two separate lives become one single, uninterrupted stream of being.

Editor: The Glitch