Dial Tone Static

[Verse 1]
The dial tone static hums a D minor off the windowpane
at three-forty-seven, south of the Buford Highway rain.
You're a ghost in the fiber optic, a latency I can't trace,
just the heat-trace of your voice still mapped across this empty space.
I'm archiving the metadata, the pixel-fade of your last smile,
running diagnostics on the silence for a little while.
It's preemptive system failure, a backup of a memory not yet lost,
I'm calculating interest on a future emotional cost.

[Chorus]
And this dial tone static's the soundtrack to you fading out of view.
It's the empty request packet after the handshake's through.
The sound of me saving a copy of a version of you.
The empty request packet after the handshake's through.

[Verse 2]
Your laugh is a corrupted file I keep trying to restore,
the architecture of this feeling has no emergency door.
I diagram the load-bearing moments, the weak points in the frame,
the conversational dead drops where we both forgot the name.
Remember that Tuesday in October, the server hum was our bass line?
"It'll last," you said, a promise with a flawed and weak design.
I see the stress-test fractures forming, the hairline breach in the firewall,
and I'm just watching the progress bar, waiting for the fall.

[Chorus]
And this dial tone static's the soundtrack to you fading out of view.
It's the empty request packet after the handshake's through.
The sound of me saving a copy of a version of you.
The empty request packet after the handshake's through.

[Bridge]
(Beat drops to just 808 sub and a clean, melodic, slightly detuned harp solo for 4 bars)

[Outro]
Three-forty-eight. The connection's terminated.
(Beat cuts completely. Silence for 4 seconds.)
(Beat returns, chopped and distorted, for one final line)
Still cached.