Everyone’s talking again,
not behind me this time
just around.
Like analysts swapping notes,
passing fragments across the desk
and calling it care.
Maybe it is care.
Maybe it’s curiosity.
Maybe it’s cruelty disguised as friendship.
I can’t tell anymore.
There was one conversation
a quiet one
with the subject of the puzzle.
Pauses shaped like clues,
half-formed warmth,
edges that nearly clicked.
Then silence,
like someone tipped the box
and lost the corner pieces.
Now gossip fills the gaps.
Kind voices, maybe.
Kind-ish.
It’s hard to know when laughter
and sympathy use the same frequency.
Do they think I’m that autistic?
That breakable?
That useless?
I didn’t think I was so bad at this
the human patch updates,
the context files.
My meltdowns don’t shout.
They leak.
Crying,
words tumbling faster than they form,
a language buffer overflow.
Lightning thoughts,
verbal mush.
Me wishing I could say
“I just need the puzzle to make sense,”
and maybe, if system resources allow,
a hug.
Work’s fine.
Work’s always fine.
Give me a technical puzzle
I’ll solve it,
Give me human emotion,
and the parser fails.
Still I keep running diagnostics,
searching for logic
in all this noise.
Because somewhere under the static,
the scientist’s still awake
sorting, sifting,
believing that patterns appear
even in chaos.
And if kindness and laughter
sound the same right now,
I’ll tune the signal again,
slowly,
patiently,
until hopefully truth comes back into focus.
