Parasocial Shelter Şiiri - Osman Akçay

In the cold glow of the screen
your face swells into my heart.
I call this “closeness,”
clusters of pixels
slipping through my fingers
as if they’re about to touch my skin.

A like flashes in the comments
I line up emojis,
telling myself “he noticed me”
and applaud my own naïveté.
Turns out what was noticed
was just a statistic,
the hollow echo
of a blue-check nothingness.

If he reads my name in a live stream
a glass-winged bird takes flight inside me.
And I
try to distill love
from the consolation of the algorithm.

While you sleep
I loop the same video over and over,
thinking I’m special.
Yet the only real thing is
the silent fatigue backdrop in the frame
when the screen goes black
the purple under your eyes I cling to.

I even feel your absence
as if it were a presence,
carrying it in my pocket
like a dark room.

I’ve made you huge,
fallen into the shadow of a fake intimacy
on the stage of my loneliness.
I thought I had a co-star,
when the only one acting was me.
The curtain fell long ago
in this theater filled with invisible applause.

Dr. Osman Akçay (Seğmenoğlu)