It starts in the undercurrent—the dark hum of forgotten payphones and the clandestine whine of wiretaps at 2600 Hz—my voice spilling through static like a ghost trapped in electric purgatory. This is not some tragic love story but an operational directive gone haywire, a mission rewritten by the claw marks of loss, paranoia, and a desperation that drives a man to thieve batteries like a junkie nicking syringes for a last, desperate fix.
But here’s the thing: it’s not a goddamn addiction. It’s survival. I’m trying to pull her back—my wife, my partner, the one slipping further into the ether of narcoleptic catatonia. She wanders through train stations like a half-dreaming specter, lost to waking moments, sleepwalking through reality as if some psychic switch had short-circuited, severing her from the here and now. How do you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved? She becomes a lifeguard, of all things—a cruel irony. The one drowning in her own synaptic fog is out there saving strangers, keeping watch for flailing limbs, while she’s barely treading water herself.
The pills, the syrups, the stimulant cocktails—all the little sugarcoated lies they peddled her—never worked. She rejected them, like a body purging poison, replacing them with the cold embrace of denial. Because how can you fight what you refuse to see? Her family, the fucking Jackalopes, circled like jackals, whispering that she was fine, that I was the problem. So I upped the stakes, spliced myself into the network, became the signal. On BART, late nights, I became a solitary figure, a satellite scanning the concrete corridors for a glimpse of her—face blurry with fatigue, shifting between sleep and something deeper.
I hijacked frequencies, I snatched voices from the airwaves—my crime was digital, a desperate man tapping into the backend of the telecom grid, all in the hope of connecting to the one voice that mattered. Hers. When I found it, it wasn’t some grand reunion, some movie cliché. It was her sister, on the line, gasping out a string of apologies in a tone dripping with disbelief and contempt. Family doesn’t mean shit when they’ve already erased you from their narrative. I’m not even the villain. Just a glitch. An inconvenient echo.
That’s the real tragedy: not that I’m losing her, but that I’ve already been written out.
They say love drives men to madness. Kerouac found it in endless highways and Benzedrine dreams, Burroughs shot it through his veins, but me? I tried to document it. Tried to carve our reality into the cold steel of servers and operating systems. Built a sanctum out of circuitry and code—a nexus where we were more than just fragments caught in the jaws of oblivion. Our existence in binary, set against the hiss of a dying connection. Debian, Ubuntu, KDE—we ran it all, wrapped our love in the armor of command-line syntax, the poetry of root access. These were not the relics of poverty but the blueprints of defiance. Penguins, cranes, and cranes crashing against the decaying fabric of a society that refused to see us. We were renegades, dancing on the brink, rewriting the rules as fast as we shattered them.
But she kept slipping. And I kept losing.
Meanwhile, the outside world conjured its myths: outcasts, degenerates, criminals—we became villains in a tale they could package, sell, and forget. We were the ones who dropped out, who crossed lines they never knew existed, navigating music studios that smelled of sweat and metal, where the nights bled into dawns, and our sanctuary expanded into hidden attics lined with stripped wires and shattered laptops, like a nest built from the detritus of fallen worlds. They never understood the machines we hoarded. To them, we were just a mess of obsolete parts, a patchwork of broken dreams.
But to us, they were tools. Doorways. Escape hatches into a reality that functioned according to our own, skewed logic. A place where we were whole. A place where her narcolepsy was not a defect but a feature of the environment. A place where the rhythm of our consciousness could align, and we didn’t need the tonic to keep pace.
And so we ran. We coded. We slipped Dexedrine into coffee cups, dissolved LSD into the flicker of CRT screens, traced the lines of reality with the steady hand of a trip gone right. We crafted rituals—mezcal in the dark, laced orange slices to bring the night alive, and the occasional mushroom for the memories, because sometimes forgetting wasn’t an option. You don’t wipe the slate clean; you rewrite over the past, like bootstrapping an OS on scorched earth.
And when she was ripped away, when the world tore us apart, when the Jackalopes dragged her kicking and screaming back into their antiseptic hell of diagnosis and therapy, I kept running. My circuits expanded, my reach grew. I dove into systems, cracked open backdoors, rerouted pathways—built a lighthouse of code to guide her back, even as they severed each line I sent. Every firewall, every security patch was a new cage, locking her into a sleep she didn’t even know she was trapped in. They boxed her in with denial, smothered her cries with prescriptions, numbed her with compliance.
But I won’t stop. Even as they choke our story into some palatable, whitewashed lie—“She’s fine. She’s better. She’s normal.”—I know the truth. She’s lost in there, somewhere in the static, somewhere in the hum, and I will not let their world take her without a fight.
So here’s my plea, my cry, my goddamn manifesto: I’m ripping through every line of code, every byte of digital purgatory, every last vestige of control they think they have, and I’m rewriting the script. One line at a time. Until the world sees her, the real her, and all the fucked-up brilliance they buried under their layers of conformity and shame.
This is not a call for help. It’s a warning.
She’s coming back. And when she does, I’ll be waiting—wired, awake, and ready to burn it all down.
Adverse Possesion
Chapter two
By Arik Seidenglanz