The Ethernet Witch Project

I almost threw her iPhone into the pool. Not that night—we were still making love by the candlelight, her breath against my neck, the world beyond our cheap motel room forgotten—but later, when I found the texts.

Six months later, I'm the asshole who sits by the apartment complex pool at dusk, watching the water turn from blue to black, nursing warm beer and checking my phone like it holds answers it can't give. The pool's broken filter hums a low, pathetic note. Water laps against the concrete edge, rhythmic and indifferent.

The cable guy is here again. Third time this month. I watch him through the sliding glass door, his orange vest bright against the beige carpet, his fingers deft among the tangled wires behind the TV. I wonder if he knows how much loneliness travels through those cables—how many desperate calls, how many silence-filled evenings, how many people like me, tethered to devices that promised connection but delivered only this.

He knocks on my door. "All fixed, man. You should get faster speeds now."

"Thanks," I say, and mean it. Connection is connection, however thin.

I go back to the pool. My iPhone buzzes—her name lights up the screen, pulling me under like water in my lungs. Six months. Six months of almost-calls, of typing and deleting, of waking to empty sheets and the cruel clarity of morning.

I don't throw the phone in the pool. I don't answer. I sit and watch the water's surface until I can't tell where the pool ends and the sky begins, until the only thing real is the hum of the cable through the wall, carrying someone else's connection, someone else's hope, through wires that remember everything they've ever carried.