Click

I write to you, and my message is pulled through Cape Town, Seattle, Madrid, Paris, Washington, Atlanta, and Dallas, a string of cities I have rarely touched, folded together in an instant. They press closer than we do, flattened into proximity by an underwater network that I have never seen and only heard about. The pings that they make, from one point to the other. You write back, and the message bends halfway across the world along another path: Cape Town, Dublin, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, the same planet pinched again in different places. We mould ourselves to fit in a click, singular but plentiful, extending far beyond the bodies of you and I, so that we can be squeezed, scattered, and then reassembled. By the time my words reach you, the world will have shaped itself to make room for us.

I imagine the invisible network to be strips of unending wires, threaded across the seabed, following pathways decided long before you and I even met. Treaties were signed, borders drawn, routes negotiated, an entire convergence of forces settling into place so that these messages between us could pass. Our desires, our intentions and affections, now carried along these lines calculated by what appears logical and efficient, as though my longing could be calculated in cost, in latency, in permission.

Here, intimacy is procedural. Proximity is not felt but assigned, produced by historical contingencies and routing tables rather than closeness or care. What feels like connection is sustained by a system that allows nearness without acknowledging who is near to whom, letting our messages touch without ever meeting.

I begin to feel uneasy about how easily we fit into this system. How readily we allow ourselves to be divided into packets, numbered, encrypted, reassembled elsewhere. To travel, we must become abstract. To arrive, we must be legible to machines that do not know us.

I have never been to Cape Town, yet it seems as though I pass through it often. I look it up, calling on Cape Town to explain itself to me, and the network tells me that it is a major landing point for undersea cables, a place where continents are stitched together. Some other cities appear to be the same. These names accumulate not as destinations, but as proof of passage. On this warped map of connections, other places instead disappear entirely, flattened, bypassed and erased, to make room for my message moving across the world towards you.

I start to recognise these places not by their landmarks nor by their weather, but by how long they hold my words before letting them through. A fraction of a section here, a longer pause elsewhere. Time stretches and compresses unevenly, no longer measured by distance but by agreement. I start to feel closer to these abstract coordinates, long strings of numbers punctuated by a period, than to my immediate surroundings. They receive me when no one else does.

Occasionally, the system falters just enough to reveal itself. A message arrives twice. A sentence appears out of order. A delay stretches long enough to be felt. Our internet is not instantaneous, and the worlds you and I may enter are, in fact, not simultaneous. These moments feel disproportionate, as though something monumental has briefly stumbled. I am reminded then that this smoothness is maintained and not naturally occurring, that cables can fray, servers can fail, and suddenly the distance between you and I reveals itself after all. The compression loosens. The world seems briefly less folded, more resistant. But the system recovers quickly. The interruption closes. The path resumes. Whatever friction surfaced is absorbed, corrected, and forgotten, leaving no trace except the memory that the connection was never guaranteed.

And yet, we continue. We write again and again, repeating the gesture. Each message redraws the world slightly, not by creating new routes but by deepening old ones. Some paths grow tighter, more efficient, more inevitable. Others fade further into irrelevance. The system learns about us as much as we use it.

I wonder what would happen if we stopped. If the cables would rest, if the cities would loosen their grip, if the globe might slowly return to a less distorted shape. But the thought does not last. You write again, and the path reforms instantly, obedient and practised. The compression has already been anticipated. The infrastructure waits, stretched and ready. By the time I respond, the route is prepared. When I click, the Earth folds once more, briefly and efficiently, making space for a message that will arrive almost immediately, carrying with it the weight of everywhere it had to pass through to feel close.

While this takes place, I remain still. I stand in a room that does not move, surrounded by furniture that does not compress itself to meet me. My hands rest on a cold surface, worn smooth by repetition, and my world stands still. Nothing around me seems to acknowledge the distance that my gesture is able to cross, the ripples that my single act can create, how the planet itself bends for my message to you.

I write to you knowing how minor this is. Knowing that this click, which traverses continents and collapses time, is one among billions, processed without resistance, without memory. The world does not change for me. It only briefly accommodates me, then returns to its work, waiting for the next signal.