ACCESS DENIED The Silent Crashes We Carry.
Some stories don’t begin with tragedy.
They begin with silence the kind loud enough to break you.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the strange tension between being human and living in a world built on code.
How emotions don’t always follow logic…
and how life sometimes feels like a system constantly asking for permissions we never approved.
I wrote this piece to capture that feeling —
the blend of tech, vulnerability, and resilience we all navigate.
But this reflection comes from somewhere darker.
A memory I never talk about, because even now, it still stings.
---
The Engineer I Knew
I once worked with an engineer who everyone trusted with the tough problems.
He was the calm in every outage, the one whose presence alone felt like a patch release.
People called him “the reliable one.”
The solver.
The steady hand.
But real life isn’t version-controlled.
And his own internal system had been crashing for a long time.
---
The Night Everything Slipped Through the Cracks
It was a Friday evening one of those days when the office hums quietly after most people have left.
I stayed behind to finish a task.
He stayed behind because he didn’t know where else to go.
I walked past his desk and saw him in the blue glow of his monitor.
Not coding.
Not troubleshooting.
Just… staring.
His shoulders were still, but his eyes looked like something had been torn out of him.
I asked gently,
> “Hey… you good?”
He didn’t turn.
He didn’t even flinch.
He just whispered almost like the words were escaping on their own:
> “I can fix a database corruption in thirty minutes…
but I can’t fix what’s happening inside me.”
---
There are moments that split your memory in half.
That was one of mine.
He told me haltingly, painfully that someone he loved had left his life just days earlier.
Not a breakup. Not a simple conflict.
A sudden disappearance of presence.
One morning they were there.
By nightfall, gone without a trace or explanation.
He showed up to work anyway.
Because that’s what “strong people” do.
They soldier on with cracked armor and hope no one notices the pieces falling off.
But the signs were everywhere:
Functions taking him minutes to parse
Hands trembling on the keyboard
A smile that didn’t reach anywhere near his eyes
Typos he never used to make
Long pauses where he looked at his own code like it belonged to a stranger
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At one point, he just stared at a simple loop for so long that the screen dimmed.
Then he said something I’ll never forget:
“Machines at least tell you when something is wrong.
Humans don’t.”
He wasn’t talking about technical errors.
He was naming the kind of grief we compress into silence.
The kind we bury under productivity, deadlines, and pretending-we’re-fine-so-we-don’t-inconvenience-anyone.
He didn’t need a debugger.
He needed someone to see him.
Lessons from Silent Crashes
That night changed me.
Not suddenly, but deeply like a slow back-end update you don’t realize has rewritten every line of how you understand the people around you.
Since then I’ve learned:
People carry silent crashes.
People run background pain you never read in their logs.
People reboot themselves every morning without applause.
And still… they show up.
Still build.
Still try.
This poem is for people like him
and for anyone living with error messages the world never sees.
..
ACCESS DENIED
We are all running on borrowed circuits,
patched-together souls
in a world that reads us like poorly written code.
Some days feel like
ACCESS DENIED
flashing across our hearts
a rejection we never debugged,
a firewall we never built.
We navigate life like broken algorithms,
looping through memories
we should’ve released years ago,
retrying connections
that time already timed-out.
Humans are strange machines
soft parts in a hard world,
searching for meaning in systems
that were never designed to explain themselves.
We love like open-source projects,
laying out our inner lines
for anyone willing to read them.
And sometimes people rewrite us
without permission.
Yet inside all the errors,
the corrupted files,
the quiet midnight crashes
there is something beautiful:
We reboot.
We keep trying.
We refuse to shut down.
Maybe that’s what sets us apart
from the machines we build.
They follow logic.
We follow hope.
And even when life flashes
that brutal neon message:
ACCESS DENIED
we still whisper back,
> “Let me try again.”
Because beneath the heartbreak,
beneath the circuits,
beneath the endless scrolling…
we carry a tiny line of code
that never stops running:
if (alive) { hope++; }
