There is a small machine somewhere between us, holding everything I tried to send and deciding, packet by packet, what is allowed to arrive. I picture it the way I picture an honest stranger — patient, indifferent, occasionally cruel. I have learned to write for it. Short sentences. Plain hopes. Nothing that would jam the line.

— it dropped the third one, the one about the rain.

If you are reading this it means the machine relented, or grew bored, or simply mistook my longing for ordinary traffic and let it through. I'll take any of those. I am not picky about how love arrives, only that it does.

I wrote it seven times. Each draft was an attempt to make the sentence light enough to travel — to strip the adverbs, the qualifications, the small apologies I keep stitched into everything I say. But the more I removed, the heavier it got, the way a stone is heavier once you've thrown away the dirt around it.

draft 4 — deleted at 02:51

So here is the uncompressed version, sent at full size, accepting the latency: I think about you in the gap between one thing and the next. Not constantly. Just in the seams. In the buffering. In the moments the screen goes dark and shows me my own face for half a second before the next thing loads.

It is not a grand feeling. It is a persistent one. It does not announce itself. It just keeps the connection open, refusing to time out.

People say long distance is hard because of the miles. It isn't. The miles are a number; numbers are easy. What is hard is the texture of the in-between — the typing indicator that appears and vanishes, the message marked delivered but not read, the hour you spend deciding whether silence means anything.

— or whether it is just the line.

I have started measuring us in other units. Not kilometres. Round trips. How long a thought takes to leave me, reach you, and come back changed. Some take seconds. Some take days. One — the important one — has been in transit for a while now, and I have decided not to ask the machine where it is. Some packets you have to trust.

The watercolour bleeds on this page are roughly to scale, if you must know. Each smudge is a week I didn't hear from you and didn't mind, much.

a clean transmission would be a lie — affection has no checksum.

When your words reach me with a character missing, a glyph turned to a box, a line that breaks mid-thought, I do not feel cheated. I feel the truth of it. Nothing whole survives the crossing. The version of you that arrives here is already a translation, already softened and warped by everything in between, and I have come to love the warp specifically — the place where the signal frayed and let something honest leak in.

the box-glyph stood for a word i'll never know. i kept it anyway.

So: send it broken. Send it half-formed. Send the draft you'd be embarrassed by. The error correction in me is generous. I will fill the gaps with the most forgiving guess available, and I will be right more often than not, because I have been listening to you for a long time and I know the shape your sentences want to take.

A voice note you sent at the wrong time of night, twelve seconds long, mostly breathing and a half-laugh at the end. A screenshot of a sky you saw before I did. The exact phrasing of a sentence you used once and have probably forgotten — I have not forgotten it. A typo you made that I have decided is a new word now, and I use it, privately, when nothing else fits.

folder size: small. weight: not.

I do not look at the folder often. That is not what it's for. It is for knowing it exists — a small reserve of you, cached locally, available even when the line goes down. A love letter you can read offline.

If this transmission fails entirely, if the machine swallows it whole and never coughs it back up, the folder remains. You are, in some redundant and slightly absurd way, backed up. I find this comforting. I hope you do too, or would, if you knew.

It is a difficult word to send. Too many bits. The machine treats it with suspicion, the way it treats anything that claims to be permanent. So when I typed it the channel stuttered, and the word arrived split into red and green and blue, a tremor on the screen, a glitch where I'd asked for a vow.

always.

it resolved. it always does. eventually.

I have decided that the flicker is part of the word now — that always was never meant to be sent clean. It is a thing that arrives shaking and then steadies, the same way a held breath steadies, the same way a hand steadies once it knows where it's going. The static around it is not corruption. It is the word straining to be true across a distance that does not want it to be.

So: always. With the tremor. With the channel-shift. With the three colours pulling apart for a sixth of a second before they agree to be one ink again. That is the most honest version I can transmit. Receive it as sent.

There is nothing else queued. The buffer is empty. The line, for now, is quiet, and quiet on this line means the message got where it was going and is being read by the only person it was addressed to, which is to say: you, right now, here.

— don't reply right away. let it sit.

If the signal failed, you are not reading this and it does not matter what it says. If the signal got through — and it did, because you are here, at the bottom, having unfolded the whole thing — then there is one last instruction, and it is the simplest one in the letter:

remember that someone, somewhere, kept the connection open on purpose.

[ packet 7777 — transmission complete — line idle ]