Two a.m,I was running out of reasons to stay awake

Found her somewhere between a mutual and a mistake

Kept the screen on.

Before I knew your name, I knew your feed

Before I knew your face, I had you filed

We almost learned each other off a screen

And missed the actual thing

But you showed up and nothing fit the part

Now pride means something different after dark

I found her feed through someone that we shared

Captions tight, each word precisely prepared

Quotes from books that hadn't touched her yet

A curated grief, gold-filtered sunset

I scrolled her archive like I read a spine

Judged the book exactly as designed

I almost kept it moving

But something in the gap between her posts

The quiet spaces held her like a ghost

She walked in laughing, forgot to frame it

Said something true before she could stage it

The whole feed collapsed to just her eyes

Something she hadn't posted in a while

Not tolerable.

I recognized myself in what she hid

The pride I wore the same way that she did

Both of us performing for a crowd

That never asked us to be this loud

Before I knew your name, I knew your feed

Before I knew your face, I had you filed

We almost learned each other off a screen

And missed the actual thing

But you showed up and nothing fit the part

Now pride means something different after dark

She asked something my feed had never asked

Not who I followed but what left me cracked

I felt the old performance miss a beat

The auto-caption couldn't find the heat

No filter for this.

I told her what I'd never let them see

The kind of truth that lives before the feed

She didn't screenshot it or share it wide

She just stayed with me on the other side

She said nothing, and it said everything

The kind of quiet no ring light could bring

Just us, just real.

She had a story older than her posts

The kind that makes the algorithm ghost

I had been judging her by what she showed

The same way she had read my whole zip code

We were both wrong.

She said, I wrote your story from your posts

I said, me too, and we both lost the most

Before I knew your name, I knew your feed

Before I knew your face, I had you filed

We almost learned each other off a screen

And missed the actual thing

But you showed up and nothing fit the part

Now pride means something different after dark

You are the draft I never cleared to post

The realest thing I've ever come close to

Not your followers but your two a.m.

Not your highlight reel, your in-between

I want the in-between.

You could've been the one I almost passed

Another face the algorithm stacked

But you were brave enough to be offline

With me, and nothing in the world's design

Prepared me for you.

First impressions — just a lie I believed

And pride was just the wall I had conceived

She fell for me before the grid was mine

Before the grid.

The only self I trust to cross the line

She is the draft I finally let go

The text I sent without the preview

We don't perform for anybody here

And that's the loudest thing I've ever heard

Just turn it off.

The signal's clear.