You are not a memory, though you wear its skin like a sunburn. Your edges hum with the static of cathode rays, insisting you were always this sharp. I swear I saw you blur once—just for a second—when no one was looking.
They say nostalgia is a tax on time, but you pay in quarters slipped into slots of forgotten arcades. Your music is all sine waves and stolen childhoods, yet somehow it still smells like burnt popcorn and unwashed socks. The scent is deliberate, of course. A lie so perfect it loops back into truth.
You were never innocent. Those 8-bit heroes sprinted toward nothing but the next screen, and we called it ambition. The princess was always in another castle because you knew we’d keep buying cartridges to find her. I admire the hustle. Still, I flinch when I hear the *click* of a controller’s plastic bones.
The grass in your world was green as a hospital monitor. We pretended not to notice the way it pulsed. Your sunsets were never gradients—just switches flipped from #FF6600 to #000000. The night fell like a dropped joystick. Dawn? A reset button pressed by a child who forgot to save.
Tell me, do you dream in palettes or in glitches? The answer is both. You are a museum of collisions: where the past pixelates into something new, and we mistake the artifacts for art. Your beauty is a rounding error. Your silence is the hum of a CRT left on too long.
I miss you. I never loved you. The contradiction tastes like a cheat code scribbled on a napkin—useless, but I keep it in my pocket anyway.