Cable to Nowhere

The fiber optic cable was supposed to have been my friend's masterpiece. Elena had designed the network architecture for the new data center, routing kilometers of cable through ceilings and crawl spaces like some nervous system she'd birthed into the building. Then came the corporate merger, the reorganization, and the email informing me she'd been let go.

Three months later, I found myself at the padel court with Marcus from accounting, sweating through a Friday afternoon that felt wrong without her there. Elena and I had played every week since college, our competitive volley a proxy for everything else we couldn't say.

"You heard she's consulting for the competition?" Marcus said, smashing the ball against the glass wall.

I missed my return. "No."

"Cable company across town. Same work, better pay." He shrugged. "Corporate loyalty, right?"

That evening, I drove to her apartment complex. The security gate was new, sleek, automated. I called her phone from the intercom, but it went straight to voicemail. Her mailbox was still active, though—another month paid for, another thread not yet cut.

I thought about the cable she'd threaded through that data center, how it would carry data for years after she was gone, invisible infrastructure bearing the ghost of her labor. Some friendships are like that: you think they're supporting the weight of everything, but you remove the person and the signal still travels, unhindered.

I left flowers at her door anyway. Some connections, unlike cable, can't be spliced back together once severed.