When he awoke he heard a bus passing by and despite how faint it was from this distance he still wrongfully deemed it as the cause for his early awakening, the frequency of the birds chirping told him that it was early enough to not cause him any panic. He thought back to the previous night and tried to recall what had taken place, he recalled his conversation with her and what words had been exchanged, it wasn't until about halfway through his recollection of the conversation that he consciously acknowledged that it was all imaginary, he discussed with himself what parts of it he found interesting enough to be worthy to tell her in the real world when she did eventually respond to him but gave up shortly with the belief that he would think about this later. His mind was now alert enough that he resigned himself to not falling back asleep, he rolled over to check his phone, 6:42 and no messages, he opened his chat with her to see that his messages were still on 'unread' status.

He was sure she would have read the messages in the notifications by now and chosen not to respond or even open them, he had always assumed this meant she was unsure what to respond and wanted to defer it until later, not wanting to feel pressured to respond now by confirming to him that she had seen them. This was the first time he had considered a deeper motive, perhaps she was trying to forget him and didn't want to be reminded of his presence by tempting another message when he noticed a change in status. Ast wasn't aware but this was a consequence from how in the middle of the night he had awoken and while half asleep he had thought about his relationship with her in this barely conscious state for hours and had arrived at a new conclusion that she hated him for a reason which he would never be able to discern and that she was never going to speak to him again. This conclusion stayed in the back of his mind into the morning and he just assumed it to be natural, completely forgetting that he had gone to bed completely convinced that she was as madly in love with him as he was with her and was simply testing him, this was now not even an option in his mind, she hated him and he would have to learn to move on. His alarm went off at 7:00 but he remained lying in bed with a multitude of unimportant but relaxing thoughts which were constantly interrupted by thoughts of her. His phone beeped and he immediately checked it to confirm that it was indeed her, "Hi" was all it said after 2 days. This annoyed him, he believed she should have known that by now he would have to conclude that she hated him and she should have been more apologetic for letting him get to this point. He had told her previously that he couldn't help but think she hated him if she didn't respond, she must have known. He opened the message and deliberated on what to say, catching her briefly in online status for a second before she disappeared without saying more. He had a lot he wanted to tell her but was worried something might have happened to her so he settled on "How are you?" as a formality to check she wasn't doing exceptionally bad or dying first. She responded "tired", this further agitated him as he believed she was still pretending to not know how annoyed he was, he tried to think of the best way to get this conversation onto something with more depth but noticed it was now 7:05 and he needed to be getting ready for work, he would deliberate on it further in the shower as this was not something he felt was safe to trust his instincts on.

While the shower was warming up he checked himself in the mirror and noticed his eyes looking particularly tired, it was not until now that he had realized he had not slept well and that he was more tired than usual, he pressed his finger to the cheek under his eye and pulled down on the skin just enough to feel some subtle pain, something he would do most mornings unsure of why the harmless pain comforted him. A small white pimple had formed on the edge of his moustache, the first of which he had noticed in years and he wondered if it developed entirely overnight or if he had missed the early stages of its formation. During his shower he forgave her, maybe she was acting insensitive but she has now benevolently given me a second chance with her, benevolent? why do I think it such ridiculous language? kindly would have been fine. He didn't give much thought to what he might have done to her that needed forgiving, he assumed as a fact that he had said something careless or not followed normal social conventions. He almost felt happy enough to smile when he thought about how they had forgiven each other and now a new chapter in their shared lives could now flourish, more beautiful than the last but this thought was interrupted by one of the coincidence of her responding right after he opened their chat. Had she been watching my online status? she responded right after I checked, she can track that? maybe she had just woken up at the same time, maybe it was just an unimportant coincidence. He resolved to look into it, was it even possible to watch someone's online status without opening their chat? he had previously assumed it wasn't or else he would have been utilising it himself to find out more about her actions in order to try to be what he felt was the right man for her. On a conscious level he was convinced that she had been testing him, but now felt (almost entirely from wishful thinking) that she never hated him so he didn't need to forgive her for testing him, all is fair in love and war blah blah blah. Subconsciously he still believed that she had at one point hated him but had graced him with a second chance and as such it was now his responsibility to say something interesting, he could not think of anything interesting to say and needed to get to work, he simply responded "brb work" to which she immediately replied "k".

It took 3 swipes of his palm before his chip was recognised and a "welcome" emitted from the machine in the same voice as always, he had never become comfortable with machines speaking to him thinking there was something divine about language that machines have no right to participate in. Surely they could get a variety of voices or maybe even some AI voice so it sounds different each time, 3 tries, the last time it took 3 scans was only a week ago, it's definitely getting worse, I better not need a new fucking chip soon, I have too much to think about as it is, who knows what sort of hidden so called features the newer models of these shits have, what sort of backdoors they give corporations and the government to keep track of you, what sort of metrics they can now record and transmit, I bet each time you scan they can infiltrate the companies network and send a signal back to their central database now and update them with all sorts of information about your physiology, everything has a backdoor these days, why do I even need to waste my time thinking about this? why wont they just leave me alone? Who he meant by 'they' seemed to change every time he referred to them but in general it was anyone with power over his life, the first office he passed after the unlit stairwell was his bosses and he heard his bosses usual greeting "How is it?", I cant remember the last time he said a different greeting, I'm sure he used to switch it up sometimes, maybe that's what happens when you get comfortable with a person, maybe he is just old and now set in his ways, maybe he is fundamentally a different person, if I was friends with him I could confront him on it, see if he had noticed that he has settled on a phrase and never deviates from it which is in contrast to when we first met, see if he has an explanation, maybe it is like when we first met each other he would try different greetings to see what felt right to say to me and eventually solved this question, perhaps it is inevitable to eventually reach a routine with someone in these sorts of matters, or maybe it is such a routine only because we aren't good friends, if we were friends he would subconsciously care about our interactions enough to not default to an established routine, a bit of a paradox, i want to talk to him about it but if i could talk to him then the thing i want to talk about wouldn't exist, I guess I could still ask him about it but he would think it's weird, he wouldn't care enough to give me a serious answer, I will do it anyway someday, see what he says or maybe I should just see what Ner has to say about this topic. Is what Ast would think on the way to his desk but for now he responded with a little wave and a "Hi" before continuing to his personal office at the back of the building, possibly the only word he would say to his boss today, his mind wandered as he stared at his email inbox, not really processing anything he was seeing on the screen.

Instantly he felt something was off but it took a while for him to replay the last few minutes in his mind before eventually he realised what was begging for his attention, it was how his boss had his cellphone sitting on his desk in front of him. Although Ast had never consciously been aware of his bosses phone in any sense, Ast was convinced that the placement of it on his desk was a first or else he surely would have noticed it before. This was the first time for as long as he could remember that he had given a thought of any significance to his boss and felt this to be interesting or even poetic. They crossed paths everyday yet he never really thought of his boss as a person with a full and complex life and now through no choice of his own he felt this fact had forced its way into his mind and begged him for an explanation.

Perhaps he was waiting on an important phonecall, what could this call be? maybe it was business, maybe someone he loved had been injured and he was waiting on a phonecall that they were going to be alright. perhaps he had been in the middle of a text message as he heard me approaching and placed his phone down to pretend that he was working, why would he need to pretend? he is my boss, he doesn't answer to me, oh, but it's still good for optics/morale if it looks like he is working all the time, why would that matter to him? he knows I don't do much work 90% of the time, he knows I don't talk to anyone so it wouldn't travel around the office, maybe he didn't know it was me when he heard someone approaching his office, maybe other people would judge him harshly for not working 100% of the time, he would have known it was me, i'm always the only one arriving around this time in the morning, maybe he didn't know what the time was, maybe he has a lot on his mind, what kind of things could he have on his mind? surely it is filled with business nonsense, that's the price he pays for his position, I could never do that job, I could do it but it wouldn't be worth the pay to me, to always have your mind filled with pointless nonsense relating to business, I prefer to make less and have my brainpower for things that really matter, things like this? this question came from a somewhat different voice in his head and he chuckled a little out loud at how cheeky and bold it seemed to him for this voice to question him in his own mind but it was a good spirited chuckle as he thought this voice raised a good point or maybe it had nothing to do with business, maybe he was hiding that he was sending a message because he is personally ashamed of it, maybe he is having an affair and was messaging his mistress, maybe he is like me and struggles to think of what to say and wasn't trying to hide it but was just pausing the message while he re evaluated what to say, is he even married? I have known him for 7 years and I don't know this? I assume he is, Jeff... Samson?... Sampson, that's his name, I know that at least, is it important to remember this? I mean, I know it but I should recall it every now and then right? it is what people do, remember names of people, yes, I should remind myself of his name every month or so at least, that's the least I could do for him. There are things that you know but still need to remember every now and then so you can vocalise them in a socially acceptable timeframe in the future if they are ever needed to be discussed. It's poetic to notice the small things. A name isn't a small thing the other voice chimed in.

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Ast thought about poetry a lot, he didn't think about poems so much as the idea of poetry, what poetry meant to him and what was poetic to him. He would often compose poems in his mind but would never properly consider them completed or write them down. Nonetheless he thought of himself as a great poet and took great pride in what he believed to be his superiority in this realm of emotive language. Ast truly believed that he had thought of and subsequently forgotten greater and more meaningful poems than had ever been written, at times he would indulge in a fantasy where one day he would find his muse which would inspire him to finally put pen to paper, write something timeless and make all his years of what he considered practice to finally pay off, how he would now become world renowned for his unique and tender soul.

Still blankly staring at his inbox and moving his cursor back and forth aimlessly he started to compose a poem about his boss. 'Two souls whose paths rarely intertwine' hmmm, too generic and dramatic, it feels as if I'm subconsciously remembering these words from somewhere, perhaps I should search them online to check it's not already a line, if I did that I would be telling the search engine this word combination and their AI would detect them as a beautiful combination... if they are a beautiful combination... sell them onwards to a mainstream poet who would pass them off as their own before I even had a chance to use them, whatever, they weren't the right words anyway

He knew what he wanted to express but couldn't find the words, he wanted a concise way to express how despite him technically crossing paths daily with his boss and frequent chances to impact each others lives, they never really saw each other or gave each other a second thought and certainly never materially impacted each others lives outside the brief work interaction which would have not been any different had anyone else with a different personality supplanted them. He was consciously aware that this is what he wanted to express but not through internal language, only through a vague notion of it bubbling up from his subconscious.

Wouldn't it be poetic if the first time our paths properly touched each others after thousands of interactions would also be the last time we ever interacted, what if these thoughts I am thinking now will profoundly change my life and make me a new person? the simple act of his phone on a desk let me see poetry in a completely new light and changed the entirety of my path in life? what if his mother was in hospital overseas and he was waiting to get a call about whether she died? what if he flew out there to be at her deathbed and he never returned with his soul intact? what if he could never find the strength to have such heavy responsibilities again and left for another job, he became some unassuming minion where he had less business related thoughts that he needed to focus on to create the spare time to be able to think through how he was going to go on living without her? maybe this would finally bring him back to life. Perhaps he just has some new tight pants that couldn't fit his phone? yes, it's probably something unimportant like that but I should check that everything is ok with him anyway, it might be the last time I ever see him. It would be more poetic if I don't check that everything is ok though? I could write about it in the future, I could write about not checking even if nothing of significance happens, this is interesting regardless of what actually is the truth in this physical universe. Is it poetic if you make it happen intentionally though? intentionally do what you didn't want to do in order to cause an interesting story to unfold for yourself? what am I saying? I would never normally talk to him anyway, it wouldn't be manipulating reality to choose not to talk to him, that is who I am, I am a person who doesn't talk to people, but normally he wouldn't have his phone out? his second more distant voice said to himself true, but it's a small detail, what is a small detail? small details are poetic, right? I think noticing small details and finding some great significance in them could almost be the definition of poetry. I should write a poem about him.

For the next 3 hours his thoughts were sporadically interrupted by other unimportant thoughts, tv shows he had seen, memories from being a kid, what he was going to do for lunch/dinner etc. along with dealing with incoming emails and the occasional checking of cameras/servers but for the most part he spent those morning hours thinking about the first line of his poem.

Should I call us 'souls'? souls is too ethereal, not many people believe in souls anymore so i'd alienate a great portion of humanity from that alone, it's emotive though and conveys a larger than life sense. 'People' would be too boring but it could represent how the circumstances are ordinary, it implies who they actually are doesn't matter, they could be anyone in most circumstances, but who they are does matter to this poem, it matters that they have encountered each other every day and had nothing but themselves stopping them from interacting, I could call them 'coworkers', i'm sure a lot of people could relate to this, a lot of people have coworkers they never really get to know despite many opportunities, right? I don't know, surely not to this extent, is the power dynamic important? the fact that he is my boss? What about 'humans'? it's like 'people' but it makes them seem more like conscious beings with full complex lives and emotions, but it almost sounds like it's an alien documenting their encounter with life, someone or something first learning how to properly think and feel human emotions, perhaps that's good? am I trying to document reality from outside or express it from one or both of the participants? Maybe I don't need to mention the nature of the participants in this story at all, perhaps I could just mention the interactions themselves? 'two paths that crossed but barely touched'? the point is that they don't cross though, well they do but only superficially, 'superficially', that's a good word, 'Two paths forever intertwined but only superficially', the point of the story is supposed to be that one day they stop only touching superficially so forever doesn't work here. I don't like 'paths', it sounds cheesy, 'two lives'? 'two lives which had touched each other only superficially and now...' this doesn't sound like poetry, it doesn't flow nicely, but perhaps all accurate descriptions don't flow nicely, what is poetry? it doesn't matter, whatever feels right to me, I don't think I can work out the subjects until I work out the point of the poem. Am I trying to say something profound or unique about reality or am I just trying to convey a part of reality and let its message speak for itself? I shouldn't be trying to say something about reality, billions of years have been spent on trying to understand the point of reality and how it works to no success. But also billions of years have been spent on trying to document reality and events? his other more distant voice asked true, but maybe no one has properly documented this part of reality, I hadn't heard of a story like this before? is it unique? does that matter? I need to figure out what I am trying to say. Do I though, wouldn't it be better if you just said what you felt and didn't push a message? his other voice chimed in but I don't know what I feel, yet? I know I want to talk about two acquaintances who never chose to meaningfully interact with each other before and how their first meaningful interaction was also their last. 'Acquaintances' is that the word I want? it seems like the most fitting word but I would still need to explain the nature of how they are acquaintances in order to tell the story and in doing so that would explain that they are acquaintances anyway, I think 'humans' is the best option so far.

Ast had a certain liking to the word 'humans', his girlfriend Ner had an affinity for the word and in his obsession with her he had adopted this fondness. For his 35th birthday she had bought him a cap with the word 'human' printed on it, the cap was slightly off white and the letters were all different colours. He loved this hat, it was the most personal and meaningful gift he had ever received but perhaps that was heavily influenced by his obsession with her and anything tangible from her could become just as meaningful. When he received this gift she had said "so people know", she meant so that people will know he is a human as if the label the hat bestowed on him would allow him to blend in with others better.

Ast had always been a bit of an outcast due to his proclivity to prefer his own imagination over the real world, when he desired to learn a new skill or go on a new adventure he would just imagine it instead to such a degree that he would eventually feel he didn't need to attempt it in real life, imagining he had already dissected every possible twist and turn or every aspect required in mastering the skill. He never felt compelled to prove himself to others but this lack of external actualisation caused him to develop some peculiar habits and ways of thinking which alienated him from others. Ner would often tease him for this and in a sort of game she would often challenge some odd quirk and challenge him to prove to her that he really was from this world and a relatively normal human, having successfully proved his humanity through words he would often undermine everything he had just said in some subtle way to allow the game to continue at a later point. He believed deep down that this peculiarity was a large reason why she liked him, how nothing was ever conclusive or settled between them.

He loved his 'human' cap but didn't wear it, it was one of the only pieces of decoration displayed in his house, he left it on his dresser as a reminder that if nothing else, at least one person valued him for the human that he is. While he liked the aesthetics of the hat and thought it was fashionable, he didn't wear it for the attention it would bring, Ast didn't like other people thinking about him or assuming anything about him so he preferred plain unassuming clothes. He understood that although plain clothes would still cause people to make assumptions about him, at least he would be compared to a wider variety of people and as such the actions of any specific person who also wore plain clothes would not have a large impact on people's perception of him. He thought that his favourite hat or a hat similar enough to it would generally be worn by a very specific person and as such would let people believe that they knew something about him based on the actions of the few others with a similar style.

All these thoughts about what the word 'human' meant to him passed through his mind in a vague form, most of Ast's thoughts were shapeless unlike the narrated vocalised words we have previously conveyed about poetry. He generally only thought in words if he was thinking about a topic that he thought he would have to communicate out loud at some point or if it was relating to the creation/refinement of something specific where he thought it was efficient to debate with himself and make his thoughts more concrete. Throughout this internal narration we have expressed, there were still other less relevant thoughts that were crossing his mind, most frequently thoughts about her, he couldn't seem to go 5 minutes without a thought of her crossing her mind. The frequency of dealing with her invading his thoughts had caused him to become very adept at dispelling her from his mind, he could sense the thought of her approaching well in advance when it was still bubbling up through his subconscious and cut it off before it reached his conscious mind, something he had done repeatedly throughout this morning. Despite saying 'brb' and implying he would announce his return, he now felt that she was equally responsible for making the conversation interesting and that if she cared then she would have messaged him by now. He had quickly moved on from being extremely grateful for a second chance with her and was now back to taking her presence in his life for granted.