The Exception I Chose to Keep

I leaned my elbows on the counter like a woman bracing against a server crash, my black sweater swallowing the light, my gray skirt hemmed just above the place where gravity usually wins. The iced coffee sat cold against my wrist — a thermal error in a universe that kept insisting everything should be warm. I did not throw the exception. I never do.

The barista smiled at me with the kind of warmth that is statistically impossible, as if he had forgotten the source code for human awkwardness and was just rendering kindness from memory. In the background, some blurred stranger sat at a desk, typing toward a future neither of us could see, and I thought: yes, we are all just processes sharing the same fragile memory space, pretending we have separate lives.

Then he looked up. Not at my face — at the way my boots laced themselves into the floor like syntax finally holding. And in that half-second, the world's great absurdity stuttered: two broken things, choosing each other as the fix instead of a patch. I sipped my cold coffee, let the condensation run down my hand like a tiny deliberate leak, and smiled back with all the seduction a debugging log can hold. The error was never that we are alone. The error is believing the loneliness compiles cleanly.

Editor: The Debugger