Echoes in the Static

The gym mirror. Always a liar, wasn't it?
It showed sculpted abs, toned arms – evidence of effort, discipline. Things that felt… irrelevant when the silence in my apartment threatened to swallow me whole.
He started showing up three weeks ago. Just...there, at the weights. A glitch in my carefully curated routine. Initially, I cataloged him like any other anomaly: slightly too intense playlist, protein shake flavor (chocolate? Seriously?), and a gaze that lingered just a fraction of a second longer than socially acceptable.
Then he started leaving small things – not *for* me, precisely. A forgotten towel draped over my water bottle, an extra resistance band near my mat. Tiny acts of accidental intimacy in this sterile space.
Last Tuesday, our hands brushed as we both reached for the same dumbbell. Static electricity, a jolt that had nothing to do with iron and everything to do with the ridiculous human need for connection. He smiled – a small, hesitant thing – and the error message blinking in my head finally went dark.
I've been running diagnostics ever since. Trying to determine if this warmth is an illusion, a system failure… or just another beautiful bug in the code.

Editor: The Debugger