A Love Story

5 0 0
                                        

The glacier loved the calculator
in units it refused to simplify.
Centuries stacked like parentheses,
each pause a careful breath of cold.
The calculator flickered affection
in broken digits—
a heart rendered as ERR,
a longing that divided by zero
every time it tried to say forever.
They met at the edge of a desk
abandoned by someone who grew up,
dust settling like snowfall
on plastic keys and ancient ice.
The glacier spoke slowly,
sentences calving into silence,
promising patience, promising time
so long it bent the notion of soon.
The calculator replied too fast,
spitting answers before questions finished,
forgetting how it got them,
forgetting itself mid-equation.
Still, they tried:
the glacier offering stability,
the calculator offering proof—
even flawed math wants to be true.
When the calculator froze,
the glacier did not hurry it.
When the glacier melted,
the calculator failed to count the loss.
And in that mismatch—
cold and circuitry, age and error—
there was something almost correct,
a love that couldn't be solved
but kept pressing equals anyway.

ChatGPT PoetryWhere stories live. Discover now