I'm pretty sure this isn't the world I was supposed to end up in.

Not this one, where my only link to you is a stark rectangle of glowing light and flat, glitching keys that let my words stumble out into the ether, for you to find. Where I can see your face, grinning out at me, preserved for as long as the battery lasts, but if I look too close, I see the pixels.

This world is the wrong one. That's it. That's what I can tell myself.

Somewhere long ago, my soul went wandering, and instead of ending up with you, nestled alongside you in a body that can hold you, it shunted off sideways. A mistake, a flicker in time, while my soul was sliding home, and I opened my eyes here, instead.

Maybe you feel it, the same as me. That pull, the draw to look up at the stars, to cast open the window and let my eyes drift free of the concrete tenement, up to the glimmering night. The same stars you might be looking at, shifted and realigned. And that's what I tell myself, sometimes, when the tears prick.

This was a mistake. This is the wrong world. The wrong time.

But maybe, maybe, as my fingers tighten on the windowsill, your eyes still smiling on the blue glow behind me, we're looking up at the same stars. Maybe you're feeling like this was all a mistake, that you're not where you were supposed to be, too, that somewhere out there is someone.

I'm here.

On the wrong side of the glass, but I'm here. In the dark, bathed in the glow, my fingers trying to dance yet again, to get a message through, to a better place.

Somehow.