Less than Three

Write a story about clockworks and small makers of life. Speak of little marvels. Turn the world by technology.
     What is the magic of a computer screen and zipping data? Fly a message over a foot, a mile, over the world. Touch numbers: make lives.
     Watch the human change.
     A thousand faces; none: that is how it all began. She loved the wonder of personality and anonymity, to hide and be seen. She thought it the most amazing thing.
     Tragedy she had not predicted, pain she had not prepared for. To find love in numbers, zero and one? Impossible! But she did.
     She was so much older and so much wiser in pixels than in life. Words did not stumble, words did not switch — there was escape and backspace and delete, and so there were no errors. She was smooth and calm and eloquent.
     Of course it was this way for others as well. She knew that. She understood that. Yet, she still fell in love with the superhuman voice online. Those perfect pixels of art drawn by a mouse, those quick messages of text that fingered heartstrings, that strange little language of symbols that had taken her so long to learn, all seduced her so exactly.
     It was love only for a moment, it was something brief — but it was not simple.
     Dream a technicolor nightmare of pixels before your eyes. Flash along the keyboard in a poem. Know the music of speakers turned up full.
     There was love — that sweet brief flush — daisies, laughter, words, I love you — and then that was all. Escape, close, exit, no more.
     It was a tragedy because he was no one, he could be gone in a flash, and he was passing and not even there any more.
     It was a wake up call.
     To log off, to pull back, to smile and to touch, to wake, to wander, to use voice and say:
     Love will be better elsewhere. Love will be truer elsewhere. Love will be itself when I stand from here and walk away.
     And so, for that day at least, she —
     Of whirling little advancements, of play and pause and stop, of sharper and bigger and better and faster —
     She left. 		 
Less Than Three
Less Than Three: <3
9.9.02
372 words