By skyforbes 
Basically I’m the pop-up that says “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Let me paint you a picture.
It’s 3:47 AM. My laptop is at 6.9% battery. My brain is at 3%.
My will to live? That got uninstalled in 2018 and never re-downloaded.
Suddenly, BEEP.
Windows Error.
No explanation. No context. Just the ghost of Bill Gates whispering, “You have become a bug in your own life’s code.” And honestly?
He’s right. I’m not even the software anymore. I’m the part they patch in version 27.2.6.8 because it caused spontaneous emotional combustion in users.
My life is held together by four things:
Ctrl + Z
Coping mechanisms I got from memes
A constant feeling that someone is watching me through my webcam, but they’re bored
And a haunted stapler I emotionally bonded with in Class 2 (don’t ask)
That’s it. That’s the operating system.
You know how normal people say stuff like, “I’m overwhelmed,”
“I need a break,” “I’m going to journal and take a walk”?
Yeah well. I just minimize myself. Like mentally. I shrink.
Emotionally speaking, I am one of those little boxes that hides in the bottom right corner of your screen, silently screaming:
“Pending restart.”
Every time I try to be a functional adult, my internal processor makes that wheeze and whoop sound like when you open 17 Chrome tabs and YouTube auto-plays a motivational video from 2014.
Like — Bro. I wasn’t built for this. I was built for MSN Messenger and FarmVille. I was built for dial-up tones and “you’ve got mail” energy.
Now I can’t even respond to “how are you” without buffering.
Someone asked me, “how are you?” last week, and I said, “Hold on, let me check. I haven’t run diagnostics in 10 minutes.” I opened my task manager, then I stared at it for 7 minutes because I got distracted by a folder named “DON’T OPEN” and obviously opened it
HE left.
I blinked. My inner self blinked.
Error 402.
My personality is just one giant corrupted zip file.
Can’t open it. Can’t delete it. Can’t even send it to recycle bin because apparently, some other program is using it.
WHO? Who is using it?? Is it Internet Explorer trying to make a comeback?
WhatsApp from 2018 is still running in my emotional background??
Oh. Right.
Trauma.exe, ChildhoodTrialVersion.
UnwantedPopUpsFromPeopleIRuinedFriendshipsWith.mp4
I tried updating myself the other day.
Hit “restart.” Waited.
Got the spinning circle of death.
Blue screen.
Error 20070807: You Thought Healing Was Free.
Tried turning myself off and on again. Woke up with a migraine and a Google search history that says:
“how to reset personality without factory settings”
“do men cry in bathroom”
“what is inner peace and does it come in USB form”
“how to become a normal functional human again”
“is sun really ghosting us”
The other day, someone said “Just relax.” And my nervous system did that error noise. The one that sounds like your printer is screaming internally.
The one that shakes your soul like a motherboard having a seizure.
Relax??
My body has like, 47 tabs open. Some are Pinterest boards from 2018 and Some are i don’t even know. One of them is just a YouTube video titled “duck eating grapes” that I keep open for emotional stability.
At this point, my identity is 70% digital. My search history has seen things.
My autofill knows more about me than my mother. And when I die, someone is going to go through my browser bookmarks and think, “Was this person okay?”
No.
I was running on Windows Me energy. The “Me” stands for Mental Exhaustion.
And don’t even get me started on social media. I post something, delete it.
Type a reply, edit it 17 times. Eventually, just respond with a sticker of a teddy bear eating chips, because that’s the only safe form of communication anymore.
You want authenticity online?
Here it is, I’m a digital ghost in a meat suit pretending to be a person who has their life together.
I’m a bootleg version of myself. Downloaded from a sketchy site.
Full of glitches. Probably cursed. (Kageyama, fix this)
Every time I try to open up emotionally, I get the “this program has stopped working” pop-up. Then it gives me two options:
💣Close the program
☕Wait for the program to respond
I always hit “wait.” And guess what? It never responds.
Just like me to my responsibilities.
Maybe I’m not a human anymore. Maybe I’m just a haunted smart fridge trying to remember how to love.
Maybe we’re all just broken PDFs pretending to be interactive websites.
Maybe the reason I feel empty is because I have 78 plug-ins installed and none of them are compatible with my current version of self-worth.
Maybe I don’t want to install antivirus, but someone who says “yeah man same” while we both lag in the same manner while opening 69 apps in the background at 3 in the morning.
Anyway. This post has no conclusion. Because I haven’t reached one.
I just keep scrolling through life like a Terms & Conditions pop-up I never read.
All I know is….if my life had a soundtrack, it’d be one sad, echoing Windows Error noise. Playing in a loop. On full volume. In an empty pink room. With terrible lighting. And you know what?
Respect.
Comment “beep” if you also feel like a discarded USB drive.Let’s crash together.
Digitally. Emotionally. Spiritually.