When you called I could hear a bug in the line, and not much else. Awoken at 2am by my PCB’s random koan. Finding it facedown by the lamp. Flicking its switch, I imagined you in an airport hotel, staring out the window with the headset held in one hand, a mouse in the other. A small can’s worth of dry ginger ale spraying the inside of a sashay glass. Data chugging away merrily in the loungeroom space again while you, on the other side of the equator now, with your transmissions. Their soft pixellation and hum. Maybe a Cherry whirred in the background on Windows, or else you’d opened one of the screens to the street’s humidity, the faint bleats of transit. It wasn’t your voice, not yet – like a satellite coming within orbit of a planet or moon, it was still just a twinkle. I said hello, hello. Hello, hello. Your response, a looped heartbeat of static noise, gristle on the line. I signed off and lay there in the dark, waiting for the bug to leave the room.
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