Glitch

I’ve been trying to make sense of an experience I don’t have a name for — the experience of emotional time lag. It’s the dissonance between emotional memory and present reality. Like your body forgets, but your mind knows. A kind of time glitch: joy, warmth, ache, and dislocation all layered at once.

The joy of feeling close to someone is interrupted by the truth: they now live only in a chapter already closed. A hollow echo of past intimacy that no longer fully reaches into the present. The one side left of what was once a two-sided relationship gasps — but cannot scream. So instead, a smile forms to swallow the echo whole.

 A smile that insists it feels only joy, only gratitude that it happened at all.