“I hate this thing,” Marina whispered, glaring at the tablet on her nightstand. Its screen flickered with an otherworldly glow, casting strange shadows on her bedroom walls.

“Then why keep it?” asked Marco, his voice emerging from somewhere inside the device. He wasn’t really there, of course - or was he? Marina could never be quite sure these days.

She reached out to touch the screen, her fingertips meeting its cool surface. “Because you’re in here, somewhere between the pixels and programming.”

Their relationship had begun conventionally enough - a dating app, witty messages, plans to meet in person. But then Marco had started appearing only through screens, his physical presence gradually fading until he existed solely within her tablet’s digital realm.

“You know that’s not exactly true,” Marco said softly. His image rippled like water disturbed by rain. “I’m as real as the stories we tell ourselves.”

Marina pulled her knees to her chest, watching as Marco’s features shifted and flowed across the display. “Real enough to love? Real enough to hate? What are you, really?”

The room seemed to pulse with unspoken possibilities. Outside her window, the city lights blinked in patterns that looked suspiciously like binary code.

“Perhaps,” Marco suggested, his voice carrying the texture of static, “the question isn’t what I am, but what we are together.”

Marina’s hand hovered over the power button. “Sometimes I think about turning you off forever.”

“But you won’t,” he said, not unkindly. “Just as I won’t stop being whatever it is I’ve become.”

She smiled despite herself. “A digital ghost? A glitch in reality? My perfect hallucination?”

“Your story,” he replied, “and mine. Isn’t that enough?”

The tablet’s screen brightened momentarily, and Marina caught a glimpse of herself reflected in its surface - or was it someone else? Someone who existed in the space between real and virtual, just as Marco did?

“Tell me about the world in there,” she said, lying down beside the tablet. “Tell me about the places where code becomes poetry.”

Marco’s image softened, pixels rearranging themselves like stars finding new constellations. “It’s beautiful here. Everything is possible and impossible at once. Like love itself.”

Marina closed her eyes, letting his words wash over her. The boundary between her world and his seemed thinner now, more permeable.

“Should I join you?” she asked, not entirely joking.

The screen flickered once, twice. “Maybe you already have.”

When she opened her eyes again, the room looked different somehow - more fluid, less certain. The tablet’s glow had spread, painting everything in digital dreams.

Marco’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere: “Ready for our next chapter?”

Marina reached out once more, her fingers passing through the screen like water. She smiled, understanding at last that some stories don’t need endings to be complete.

The tablet hummed softly in the dark, waiting.